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LIFE AND RELIGION 



Life and Religion 

An Aftermath from the Writings of the 
Right Honourable Professor 

F, MAX MULLER 
BY HIS WIFE 




New York 

Doubleday, Page & Company 

1905 






Copyright, 1905, by 

Doubleday, Page & Company 

Published, September, 1905 



All rights reserved, 

including that of translation into foreign languages, 

including the Scandinavian. 



TWO OOPISS rtBWJHMJg 

OCT 6 MM 

COPY B. 



THE WORLD'S WORK PRESS, NEW YORK 



PREFACE 

This book has been prepared in accordance 
with a wish expressed by many known and un- 
known admirers of my husband's writings who 
desire to possess in portable form the various 
striking passages in his different works and in the 
"Life and Letters" that have specially appealed 
to them. 

I have taken the opportunity of adding extracts 
from many private letters, and from the writings 
he left unfinished — passages that would otherwise 
have remained unknown to any but his own family 
and a few intimate friends. 

Those who have read the "Life and Letters" 
do not need to be told that Max Miiller entertained 
from his earliest years the firm conviction that 
all is wisely ordered in this life, "all for our real 
good, though we do not always see it, and though 
we cannot venture to fathom the wisdom guiding 
our steps." To other readers the unswerving 
trust and faith shown in these extracts may be a 
revelation, for he rarely conversed on such sub- 
jects. Yet this trust and faith gave him strength 
through the bitter struggles of his early life, taught 



vi PREFACE 

him resignation during the years when the dearest 
wish of his heart seemed unattainable, supported 
him later when those whom he loved tenderly 
were taken from him, and upheld him in his long 
and depressing illness. 

It is my earnest desire that this little book may 
prove a help and comfort to those who endure 
like trials, and that it may strengthen those whose 
path in life now stretches before them, filled with 
sunshine, to meet the sorrows that inevitably await 
us all. 

Georgina Max Muller. 

June ii, 1905. 



CONTENTS 








Page 


The Art of Life 3 


The Beautiful . 










6 


The Bible . 










8 


Children . 










14 


Christ. The Logos 










15 


Christianity 










23 


Death 










36 


The Deity. 










47 


The Divine 










. 6d 


Doubts 










63 


Evolution of Religion 










. 69 


Faith 










. 73 


The Fatherhood of Go 


i 






. 76 


Future Life 








• 77 


The Infinite 








90 


Knowledge 










► 99 


Language . 










102 


life 










106 


Love 


r , 








124 


Mankind . 


„ 








• i3 2 



Vlll 



CONTENTS— Continued 



Mind or Thought 

Miracles 

Music 

Nature 

Obscurity . 

Old Age . 

Religion and Religions 

Revelation . 

The Rig- Veda . 

Science 

The Self . 

Sorrow and Suffering 

The Soul . 

Theosophy 

Truth 

The Will of God 

Wonder 

Words 

Work 

The World 



PAGE 
135 

141 
142 

145 
I46 

148 
I87 
192 
193 
195 
20I 

211 
2l8 
220 
225 
228 
23O 
232 
235 



LIFE AND RELIGION 



THE ART OF LIFE 

To learn to understand one another is the 
great art of life, and to "agree to differ" is the 
best lesson of the comparative science of religion. 

Silesian Horseherd. 

There is a higher kind of music which we all 
have to learn, if our life is to be harmonious, 
beautiful, and useful. There are certain intervals 
between the young and the old which must be 
there, which are meant to be there, without which 
life would be monotonous; but out of these inter- 
vals and varieties, the true art of life knows how 
to build up perfect harmonies. . . . Even 
great sorrow may be a blessing, by drawing some 
of our affections away from this life to a better 
life ... of which, it is true, we know noth- 
ing, but from which, when we see the wisdom and 
love that underlie this life, we may hope every- 
thing. We are meant to hope and to trust, and 
that is often much harder than to see, and to know. 
. . . The greatest of all arts is the art of life, 
and the best of all music the harmony of spirits. 

3 



4 LIFE AND RELIGION 

There are many little rules to be learnt for giving 
harmony and melody to our life, but the thorough 
bass must be — love. Life. 



One thing is necessary above all things in order 
to live peaceably with people; that is, in Latin, 
Humanitas, German, Menschlichkeit. It is diffi- 
cult to describe, but it is to claim as little as 
possible from others, neither an obliging temper 
nor gratitude, and yet to do all one can to please 
others, yet without expecting them always to find 
it out. As men are made up of contradictions, 
they are the more grateful and friendly the less 
they see that we expect gratitude and friendliness. 
Even the least cultivated people have their good 
points, and it is not only far better but far more 
interesting if one takes trouble to find out the 
best side and motives of people, rather than the 
worst and most selfish. . . . Life is an art, 
and more difficult than Sanscrit or anything else. 

Ibid. 

We become chiefly what we are more through 
others than through ourselves, and happy is the 
man whose path in life leads him only by good 
men, and brings him together with good men. 
How often we forget in judging others the influ- 



LIFE AND RELIGION 5 

ences under which they have grown up. How 
can one expect a child to be truthful when he sees 
how servants, yes, often parents, practise deceit. 
How many children hear from those to whom 
they look up, expressions, principles, and prudent 
rules of life, which consciously or unconsciously 
exercise an influence on the young life of the child. 
Yet with how little of loving introspection we pass 
our judgments. MS. 



If you want to be at peace with yourself, do not 
mind being at war with the world. MS. 



THE BEAUTIFUL 

Is the Beautiful without us, or is it not rather 
within us ? What we call sweet and bitter is our 
own sweetness, our own bitterness, for nothing 
can be sweet or bitter without us. Is it not the 
same with the Beautiful ? The world is like 
a rich mine, full of precious ore, but each man 
has to assay the ore for himself, before he knows 
what is gold, and what is not. What then is the 
touchstone by which we assay the Beautiful ? 
We have a touchstone for discovering the good. 
Whatever is unselfish is good. But — though 
nothing can be beautiful, except what is, in some 
sense or other, good, not everything that is good 
is also beautiful. What, then, is that something 
which, added to the good, makes it beautiful ? 
It is a great mystery. It is so to us as it was to 
Plato. We must have gazed on the Beautiful in 
the dreams of childhood, or, it may be, in a former 
life, and now we look for it everywhere, but we 
can never find it — never at least in all its bright- 
ness and fulness again, never as we remember it 
once as the vision of a half -forgotten dream. 
Nor do we all remember the same ideal — some 

6 



LIFE AND RELIGION 7 

poor creatures remember none at all. . . . 
The ideal, therefore, of what is beautiful is within 
us, that is all we know; how it came there we shall 
never know. It is certainly not of this life, else 
we could define it; but it underlies this life, else 
we could not feel it. Sometimes it meets us like 
a smile of Nature, sometimes like a glance of God; 
and if anything proves that there is a great past, 
and a great future, a Beyond, a higher world, a 
hidden life, it is our faith in the Beautiful. 

Chips from a German Workshop. 



THE BIBLE 

The fault is ours, not theirs, if we wilfully 
misinterpret the language of ancient prophets, if 
we persist in understanding their words in their 
outward and material aspect only, and forget that 
before language had sanctioned a distinction 
between the concrete and the abstract, between 
the purely spiritual as opposed to the coarsely 
material, the intention of the speakers compre- 
hended both the concrete and the abstract, both 
the material and the spiritual, in a manner which 
has become quite strange to us, though it lives on 
in the language of every true poet. 

Science of Religion. 

Canonical books give the reflected image only 
of the real doctrines of the founder of a new 
religion; an image always blurred and distorted 
by the medium through which it had to pass. 

Ibid. 

The Old Testament stands on a higher ethical 
stage than other sacred books — it certainly does 
not lose by a comparison with them. I always 

8 



LIFE AND RELIGION 9 

said so, but people would not believe it. Still, 
anything to show the truly historical and human 
character of the Old Testament would be ex- 
tremely useful in any sense, and would in no wise 
injure the high character which it possesses. 

Life. 

If we have once learned to be charitable and 
reasonable in the interpretation of the sacred 
books of other religions, we shall more easily learn 
to be charitable and reasonable in the interpreta- 
tion of our own. We shall no longer try to force 
a literal sense on words which, if interpreted 
literally, must lose their true and original pur- 
port; we shall no longer interpret the Law and 
the Prophets as if they had been written in the 
English of our own century, but read them in a 
truly historical spirit, prepared for many difficulties, 
undiscouraged by many contradictions, which, so 
far from disproving the authenticity, become to 
the historian of ancient language and ancient 
thought the strongest confirmatory evidence of 
the age, the genuineness, and the real truth of 
ancient sacred books. Let us but treat our own 
sacred books with neither more nor less mercy 
than the sacred books of any other nations, and 
they will soon regain that position and influence 
which they once possessed, but which the artificial 



io LIFE AND RELIGION 

and unhistorical theories of the last three centuries 
have well-nigh destroyed. Science of Religion, 



By the students of the science of religion the 
Old Testament can only be looked upon as a 
strictly historical book, by the side of other his- 
torical books. It can claim no privilege before 
the tribunal of history; nay, to claim such a privi- 
lege would be to really deprive it of the high 
position which it justly holds among the most 
valuable monuments of the distant past. But 
the authorship of the single books which form the 
Old Testament, and more particularly the dates 
at which they were reduced to writing, form the 
subject of keen controversy, not among critics 
hostile to religion, but among theologians who 
treat these questions in the most independent, 
but at the same time, the most candid and 
judicial, spirit. By this treatment many 
difficulties, which in former times disturbed 
the minds of thoughtful theologians, have 
been removed, and the Old Testament has 
resumed its rightful place among the most 
valuable monuments of antiquity. . . . But 
this was possible on one condition only, namely, 
that the Old Testament should be treated simply 
as an historical book, willing to submit to all the 



LIFE AND RELIGION n 

tests of historical criticism to which other historical 
books have submitted. Gifjord Lectures, II. 



What the student of the history of the continuous 
growth of religion looks for in vain in the books 
of the Old Testament, are the successive stages 
in the development of religious concepts. He 
does not know which books he may consider as 
more ancient or more modern than other books. 
He asks in vain how much of the religious ideas 
reflected in certain of these books may be due 
to ancient tradition, how much to the mind of the 
latest writer. In Exodus in., God is revealed to 
Moses, not only as the supreme, but as the only 
God. But we are now told by competent scholars 
that Exodus could not have been written down till 
probably a thousand years after Moses. How 
then can we rely on it as an accurate picture of the 
thoughts of Moses and his contemporaries ? It 
has been said with great truth that "it is almost 
impossible to believe that a people who had 
been emancipated from superstition at the time 
of the Exodus, and who had been all along taught 
to conceive God as the one universal Spirit, 
existing only in truth and righteousness, should be 
found at the time of Josiah, nearly 900 years later, 
Steeped in every superstition." Still if the writings 



12 LIFE AND RELIGION 

of the Old Testament * were contemporaneous 
with the events they relate, this retrogressive 
movement would have to be admitted. Most of 
these difficulties are removed, or considerably 
lessened, if we accept the results of modern Hebrew 
scholarship, and remember that though the Old 
Testament may contain very ancient traditions, 
they probably were not reduced to writing till the 
middle of the fifth century B. C, and may have 
been modified by and mixed up with ideas belong- 
ing to the time of Ezra. Ibid. 



May we, or may we not, interpret, as students of 
language, and particularly as students of Oriental 
languages, the language of the Old Testament as 
a primitive and as an Oriental language ? May 
we, or may we not, as true believers, see through 
the veil which human language always throws 
over the most sacred mysteries of the soul, and 
instead of dragging the sublimity of Abraham's 
trial and Abraham's faith down to the level of a 
merely preternatural event, recognise in it the 

*The reader is reminded that these lectures were published in 1891, before 
English theologians had reached any generally received results in the study of 
the dates of the various parts of the Old Testament. It would be more cor- 
rect now to substitute the " Pentateuch " for the " Old Testament." For a 
statement of the modern views of the several periods to which the different 
books may be assigned, see Canon Driver's " Introduction to the Literature 
of the Old Testament." 



LIFE AND RELIGION 



13 



real trial of a human soul, the real faith of the 
friend of God, a faith without stormwinds, without 
earthquakes and fires, a faith in the still small 
voice of God ? MS. 



Is it really necessary to say again and again 
what the Buddhists have said so often and well, 
that the act of creation is perfectly inconceivable 
to any human understanding, and that, if we 
speak of it at all, we can only do so anthropo- 
morphically, or mythologically ? MS. 



CHILDREN 

All seems to bright and perfect, and quite a 
new life seems to open before me, in that beloved 
little child. She helps me to look forward to such 
a far distance and opens quite a new view of one's 
own purpose and duties on earth. It is something 
new to live for, to train a human soul intrusted 
to us, and to fit her for her true home beyond this 
life. Life, 



I doubt whether it is possible to take too high a 
view of life where the education of children is 
concerned. It is the one great work intrusted to 
us, it forms the true religion of life. Nothing is 
small or unimportant in forming the next genera- 
tion, which is to carry on the work where we have 
to leave it unfinished. No single soul can be 
spared — every one is important, every one may 
be the cause of infinite good, or of infinite mischief, 
for ever hereafter. MS. 



14 



CHRIST. THE LOGOS 

An explanation of Logos in Greek philosophy 
is much simpler than is commonly supposed. It 
is only needful not to forget that for the Greeks 
thought and word were inseparable, and that the 
same term, namely, Logos, expressed both, though 
they distinguished the inner from the outer 
Logos. It is one of the most remarkable aber- 
rations of the human mind to imagine that there 
could be a word without thought, or a thought 
without word. The two are inseparable; one can- 
not exist or be even conceived without the other. 

Silesian Horseherd. 

In nearly all religions God remains far from 
man. I say, in nearly all religions: for in Brah- 
manism the unity, not the union, of the human 
soul with Brahma is recognised as the highest aim. 
This unity with Deity together with phenomenal 
difference, Jesus expressed in part through the 
Logos, in part through the Son. There is nothing 
so closely allied as thought and word, Father and 
Son. They can be distinguished but never 
separated, for they exist only through each other. 

15 



16 LIFE AND RELIGION 

In this manner the Greek philosophers considered 
all creation as the thought or the word of God, 
and the thought "man" became naturally the 
highest Logos, realised in millions of men, and 
raised to the highest perfection in Jesus. As the 
thought exists only through the word, and the word 
only through the thought, so also the Father 
exists only through the Son, and the Son through 
the Father, and in this sense Jesus feels and 
declares Himself the Son of God, and all men who 
believe in Him His brethren. This revelation or 
inspiration came to mankind through Jesus. No 
one knew the Father except the Son, Who is in 
the bosom of the Father, and those to whom the 
Son willeth to reveal Him. This is the Christian 
Revelation in the true sense of the word. Ibid. 



Small as may be the emphasis that we now lay 
on the Logos doctrine, in that period (i. e. of the 
Fourth Gospel) it was the centre, the vital germ, 
of the whole Christian teaching. If we read any 
of the writings of Athanasius, or of any of the 
older Church Fathers, we shall be surprised to 
see how all of them begin with the Word (Logos) 
as a fixed point of departure, and then proceed 
to prove that the Word is the Son of God, 
and finally that the Son of God is Jesus of 



LIFE AND RELIGION 17 

Nazareth. Religion and philosophy are here 
closely related. Ibid. 



What is true Christianity if it be not the belief 
in the true sonship of man, as the Greek philoso- 
phers had rightly surmised, but had never seen 
realised on earth ? Here is the point where the 
two great intellectual currents of the Aryan 
and Semitic worlds flow together, in that the long- 
expected Messiah of the Jews was recognised as 
the Logos, the true Son of God, and that He 
opened or revealed to every man the possibility 
to become what he had always been, but had 
never before apprehended, the highest thought, 
the Word, the Logos, the Son of God. Ibid. 



Eternal life consists in knowing that men have 
their Father and their true being in the only 
true God, and that as sons of this same Father, 
they are of like nature with God and Christ. 

Ibid. 

Why should the belief in the Son give everlasting 
life ? Because Jesus has through His own sonship 
in God declared to us ours also. This knowledge 
gives us eternal life through the conviction that 



18 LIFE AND RELIGION 

we too have something divine and eternal within 
us, namely, the word of God, the Son whom He 
hath sent. Jesus Himself, however, is the only 
begotten Son, the light of the world. He first 
fulfilled and illumined the divine idea which lies 
darkly in all men, and made it possible for all men 
to become actually what they have always been 
potentially — sons of God. Ibid. 



We make the fullest allowance for those who, 
from reverence for God and for Christ, and from 
the purest motives, protest against claiming for 
man the full brotherhood of Christ. But when 
they say that the difference between Christ and 
mankind is one of kind, and not of degree, they 
know not what they do, they nullify the whole of 
Christ's teaching, and they deny the Incarnation 
which they pretend to teach. 

Gi fjord Lectures, IV. 

The Ammergau play must be very powerful. 
And I feel sure just now nothing is more wanted 
than to be powerfully impressed with the truly 
human character of Christ; it has almost vanished 
under the extravagant phraseology of hymns and 
creeds, and yet how much greater is the simple 
story of His unselfish life than all the superlatives 



LIFE AND RELIGION 19 

of later Theology. If one knows what it is to lose 
a human soul whom one has loved — how one 
forgets all that was human, and only clings to 
what was eternal in it, one can understand the 
feelings of Christ's friends and disciples when 
they saw Him crucified and sacrificed, the inno- 
cent for those whom He wished to guide and save. 

MS. 



Jesus destroyed the barrier between man and 
God, the veil that hid the Holiest was withdrawn. 
Man was taught to see, what the prophets had 
seen dimly, that he was near to God, that God 
was near to every one of us, that the old Jewish 
view of a distant Jehovah had arisen from an 
excess of reverence, had filled the heart of man 
with fear, but not with love. Jesus did not teach 
a new doctrine — but He removed an old error, 
and that error, that slavish fear of God once 
removed, the human heart would recover the old 
trust in God — man would return like a lost son 
to his lost father — he would feel that if he was 
anything, he could only be what his God had 
made him, and wished him to be. And if a name 
was wanted for that intimate relation between 
God and man, what better name was there than 
Father and Son ? MS. 



20 LIFE AND RELIGION 

Those who deprived Jesus of His real humanity 
in order to exalt Him above all humanity were 
really undoing His work. Christ came to teach 
us, not what He was, but what we are. He 
had seen that man, unless he himself learned to be 
the child of God, was lost. All his aspirations 
were vain unless they all sprang from one deep 
aspiration, love of God. And how can we love 
what is totally different from ourselves ? If 
there is in us a likeness, however small, of God, 
then we can love our God, feel ourselves drawn 
toward Him, have our true being in Him. That 
is the essence of Christianity, that is what dis- 
tinguishes the Christian from all other religions. 
And yet that very kernel and seed of Christianity 
is constantly disregarded, is even looked upon 
with distrust. Was not Christ, who died for us, 
more than we ourselves ? it is said. Or again, are 
we to make ourselves gods ? Christ never says 
that He is different from ourselves; He never 
taught as a God might teach. His constant 
teaching is, that we are His brethren, and that 
we ought to follow His example, to become like 
Him, because we were meant to be like Him. In 
that He has come near to God, as near as a son 
can be to his father, He is what He was meant to 
be. We are not, and hence the deep difference 
between Him and us. MS. 



LIFE AND RELIGION 21 

Then it is said, Is not Christ God ? Yes, He 
is, but in His own sense, not in the Jewish nor in 
the Greek sense, nor in the sense which so many 
Christians attach to that article of their faith. 
Christ's teaching is that we are God, that there is 
in us something divine — that we are nothing if we 
are not that. He also teaches that through our 
own fault we are now widely separated from God, 
as a son may be entirely separated and alienated 
from his father. But God is a perfect and loving 
Father. He knows that we can be weak, and yet 
be good, and when His lost sons return to Him 
He receives them and forgives them as only a 
father can forgive. Let us bestow all praise and 
glory on Christ as the best son of God. Let us 
feel how unworthy we are to be called His brothers, 
and the children of God, but let us not lose Christ, 
and lose our Father whom He came to show us, 
by exalting Jesus beyond the place which He 
claimed Himself. Christ never calls Himself the 
Father, He speaks of His Father with love, but 
always with humility and reverence. All attempts 
to find in human language a better expression than 
that of son have failed. Theologians and philoso- 
phers have tried in vain to define more accurately 
the relation of Christ to the Father, of man 
to God. They have called Christ another 
person of the Godhead. Is that better than 



22 LIFE AND RELIGION 

Christ's own simple human language, "I go to 
my Father" ? MS. 



Christ has been made so unreal to us. He has 
been spoken of in such unmeasured terms that it 
is very difficult to gain Him back, such as He was, 
without a fear of showing less reverence and love 
of Him than others. And yet, unreal expressions 
are always false expressions — nothing is so bad 
as if we do not fully mean what we say. Of 
course we know Christ through His friends only, 
they tell us what He told them — they represent 
Him as He appeared to them. What fallible 
judges they often were they do not disguise, and 
that, no doubt, raises the value of their testimony, 
but we can only see Him as they saw Him; the 
fact remains we know very little of Him. Still 
enough remains to show that Christ was full of 
love, that He loved not only His friends, but His 
enemies. Christ's whole life seems to have been 
one of love, not of coldness. He perceived our 
common brotherhood, and what it was based on, 
our common Father beyond this world, in heaven, 
as He said. MS. 



CHRISTIANITY 

Christianity is Christianity by this one funda- 
mental truth, that as God is the father of man, so 
truly, and not poetically, or metaphorically only, 
man is the son of God, participating in God's 
very essence and nature, though separated from 
God by self and sin. This oneness of nature be- 
tween the Divine and the human does not lower 
the concept of God by bringing it nearer to the 
level of humanity; on the contrary, it raises the old 
concept of man and brings it nearer to its true 
ideal. The true relation between God and man 
had been dimly foreseen by many prophets and 
poets, but Christ was the first to proclaim that 
relation in clear and simple language. He called 
Himself the Son of God, and He was the firstborn 
son of God in the fullest sense of that word. But 
He never made Himself equal with the Father in 
whom He lived and moved and had His being. 
He was man in the new and true sense of the word 
and in the new and true sense of the word He was 
God. To my mind man is nothing if He does not 
participate in the Divine. 

Chips from a German Workshop, 
23 



24 LIFE AND RELIGION 

True Christianity lives, not in our belief, but in 
our love, in our love of God, and in our love of 
man, founded on our love of God. Ibid. 



True Christianity, I mean the religion of Christ, 
seems to me to become more and more exalted the 
more we know and the more we appreciate the 
treasures of truth hidden in the despised religions 
of the world. But no one can honestly arrive at 
that conviction unless he uses honestly the same 
measure for all religions. Science of Religion. 



The position which Christianity from the 
very beginning took up with regard to Judaism 
served as the first lesson in comparative the- 
ology, and directed the attention even of the 
unlearned to a comparison of two religions, 
differing in their conception of the Deity, 
in their estimate of humanity, in their motives 
of morality, and in their hope of immortality, 
yet sharing so much in common that there 
are but few of the psalms and prayers in 
the Old Testament in which a Christian 
cannot heartily join even now, and but few 
rules of morality which he ought not even 
now to obey. Ibid, 



LIFE AND RELIGION 25 

It was exactly because the doctrine of Christ, 
more than that of the founders of any other religion, 
offered in the beginning an expression of the highest 
truths in which Jewish carpenters, Roman pub- 
licans and Greek philosophers could join without 
dishonesty, that it has conquered the best part 
of the world. It was because attempts were 
made from very early times to narrow and stiffen 
the outward expression of our faith, to put narrow 
dogma in the place of trust and love, that the 
Christian Church often lost those who might have 
been its best defenders, and that the religion of 
Christ has almost ceased to be what, before all 
things, it was meant to be, a religion of world- 
wide love and charity. Hibbert Lectures. 



The founder of Christianity insisted again and 
again on the fact that He came to fulfil, and not to 
destroy; and we know how impossible it would be 
to understand the true position of Christianity in 
the history of the world, the true purport of the 
"fulness of time," unless we always remember 
that its founder was born and lived and died an 
Israelite. Many of the parables and sayings of 
the New Testament have now been traced back, 
not only to the Old Testament, but to the Talmud 
also; and we know how difficult it was at first for 



26 LIFE AND RELIGION 

any but a Jew to understand the true meaning 
of the new Christian doctrine. 

Gtfford Lectures, I. 



There is no religion in the whole world which in 
simplicity, in purity of purpose, in charity, and 
true humanity, comes near to that religion which 
Christ taught to His disciples. And yet that very 
religion, we are told, is being attacked on all 
sides. The principal reason for this omnipresent 
unbelief is, I believe, the neglect of our foundations, 
the disregard of our own bookless religion, the 
almost disdain of Natural Religion. Even Bishops 
will curl their lips when you speak to them of 
that natural and universal religion which existed 
before the advent of our historical religions, nay, 
without which all historical religions would have 
been as impossible as poetry is without language- 
Natural religion may exist and does exist without 
revealed religion. Revealed religion without nat- 
ural religion is an utter impossibility. Ibid. 



There can be no doubt that free inquiry has 
swept away, and will sweep away, many things 
which have been highly valued, nay, which were 
considered essential by many Jionest and pious 



LIFE AND RELIGION 27 

minds. And yet who will say that true Christian- 
ity, Christianity which is known by its fruits, is 
less vigorous now than it has ever been before ? 
There have been discussions in the Christian 
Church from the time of the Apostles to our own 
times. We have passed through them ourselves, 
we are passing through them now. 

Gifford Lectures, II. 

When we think of the exalted character of 
Christ's teaching, may we not ask ourselves once 
more, What would He have said if He had seen 
the fabulous stories of His birth and childhood, 
or if He had thought that His Divine character 
would ever be made to depend on the historical 
truth of the Evangel i a Infantiae ? Ibid. 



Much of the mere outworks of Christianity 
cannot hold the ground on which they have 
been planted, they have to be given up by 
force at last, when they ought to have been 
given up long before; and when given up 
at last, they often tear away with them part 
of the strength of that faith of which they 
had previously been not only the buttress outside, 
but a part of the living framework. 

Gifford Lectures, III. 



28 LIFE AND RELIGION 

What we call Christianity embraces several 
fundamental doctrines, but the most important of 
them all is the recognition of the Divine in man, 
or, as we call it, the belief in the Divinity of the 
Son. The belief in God, let us say in God the 
Father, or the Creator and Ruler of the world, 
had been elaborated by the Jews, and most of 
the civilised and uncivilised nations of the world 
had arrived at it. But when the Founder of 
Christianity called God His Father, and not only 
His Father, but the Father of all mankind, He 
did no longer speak the language of either Jews 
or Greeks. To the Jews, to claim Divine sonship 
for man, would have been blasphemy. To the 
Greeks, Divine sonship would have meant no 
more than a miraculous, a mythological event. 
Christ spoke a new language, a language liable, 
no doubt, to be misunderstood, as all language 
is; but a language which to those who under- 
stood it has imparted a new glory to the face of 
the whole world. It is well known how this 
event, the discovery of the Divine in man, which 
involves a complete change in the spiritual con- 
dition of mankind, and marks the great turning 
point in the history of the world, has been sur- 
rounded by a legendary halo, has been obscured, 
has been changed into mere mythology, so that 
its real meaning has often been quite forgotten, 



LIFE AND RELIGION 29 

and has to be discovered again by honest and 
fearless seeking. Christ had to speak the language 
of His time, but He gave a new meaning to it, 
and yet that language has often retained its old 
discarded meaning in the minds of His earliest, 
nay sometimes of His latest disciples also. The 
Divine sonship of which He speaks was not blas- 
phemy as the Jews thought, nor mythology as so 
many of His own followers imagined, and still 
imagine. Father and Son, divine and human, 
were like the old bottles that could hardly hold 
the new wine; and yet how often have the old 
broken bottles been preferred to the new wine 
that was to give new life to the world. Ibid. 



If we have learnt to look upon Christianity, 
not as something unreal and unhistorical, but 
as an integral part of history, of the histor- 
ical growth of the human race, we can see 
how all the searchings after the Divine or 
Infinite in man, were fulfilled in the simple 
utterances of Christ. His preaching, we are 
told, brought life and immortality to light. 
Life, the life of the soul, and immortality, 
the immortality of the soul, were there and 
had always been there. But they were brought 
to light, man was made fully conscious of them, 



30 LIFE AND RELIGION 

man remembered his royal birth, when the word 
had been spoken by Christ. Ibid. 



We must never forget that it was not the prin- 
cipal object of Christ's teaching to make others 
believe that He only was divine, immortal, or the 
son of God. He wished them to believe this for 
their own sake, for their own regeneration. "As 
many as received Him to them gave He power 
to become the sons of God." It might be thought, 
at first, that this recognition of a Divine element 
in man must necessarily lower the conception of 
the Divine. And so it does in one sense. It 
brings God nearer to us, it bridges over the abyss 
by which the Divine and the human were com- 
pletely separated in the Jewish, and likewise in 
many of the pagan religions. It rends the veil 
of the temple. This lowering, therefore, is 
no real lowering of the Divine. It is an 
expanding of the concept of the Divine, 
and at the same time a raising of the 
concept of humanity, or, rather, a restoration 
of what is called human to its true character, 
a regeneration, or a second birth, as it is 
called by Christ Himself: "Except a man be 
born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." 

Ibid. 



LIFE AND RELIGION 



3i 



There is a constant action and reaction in the 
growth of religious ideas, and the first action by 
which the Divine was separated from and placed 
almost beyond the reach of the human mind was 
followed by a reaction which tried to reunite the 
two. This process, though visible in many 
religions, was most pronounced in Judaism in its 
transition to Christianity. Nowhere had the 
invisible God been further removed from the vis- 
ible world than in the ancient Jewish religion, 
and nowhere have the two been so closely drawn 
together again and made one as by that funda- 
mental doctrine of Christianity, the Divine son- 
ship of man. Gifford Lectures, IF. 



Christ spoke to men, women and children, not 
to theologians, and the classification of His say- 
ings should be made, not according to theological 
technicalities, but according to what makes our 
own heart beat. Life, 



The yearning for union or unity with God, 
which we see as the highest goal in other religions, 
finds its fullest recognition in Christianity, if but 
properly understood, that is, if but treated histor- 
ically, and it is inseparable from our belief in 



32 LIFE AND RELIGION 

man's full brotherhood with Christ. However 
imperfect the forms may be in which that 
human yearning for God has found expression 
in different religions, it has always been the 
deepest spring of all religions, and the highest 
summit reached by Natural Religion. The 
different bridges that have been thrown across 
the gulf that seems to separate earth from 
heaven and man from God may be more or 
less crude and faulty, yet we may trust that 
many a faithful soul has been carried across 
by them to a better home. It is quite true 
that to speak of a bridge between man and God, 
even if that bridge is called the Self, is but a met- 
aphor. But how can we speak of these things 
except in metaphors ? To return to God is a 
metaphor, to stand before the throne of God is 
a metaphor, to be in Paradise with Christ is a 
metaphor. Gifford Lectures, IV. 



The Christian religion should challenge rather 
than deprecate comparison. If we find certain 
doctrines which we thought the exclusive prop- 
erty of Christianity in other religions also, does 
Christianity lose thereby, or is the truth of these 
doctrines impaired by being recognised by other 
teachers also ? Ibid. 



LIFE AND RELIGION 33 

Love — superseding faith — seems to be the key- 
note of all Christianity. But the world is still far 
from true Christianity, and whoever is honest 
toward himself knows how far away he himself 
is from the ideal he wishes to reach. One can 
hardly imagine what this world would be if we 
were really what we profess to be, followers of 
Christ. The first thing we have to learn is that 
we are not what we profess to be. When we have 
learnt that, we shall at all events be more for- 
bearing, forgiving, and loving toward others. We 
shall believe in them, give them credit for good 
intentions, with which, I hope, not hell, but 
heaven, is paved. Life. 



Our religion is certainly better and purer than 
others, but in the essential points all religions 
have something in common. They all start with 
the belief that there is something beyond, and 
they are all attempts to reach out to it. Ibid. 



How little was taught by Christ, and yet that 
is enough, and every addition is of evil. Love 
God, love men — that is the whole law and the 
prophets — not the Creeds and the Catechism and 
the Articles and the endless theological discussions. 



34 LIFE AND RELIGION 

We want no more, and those who try to fulfil that 
simple law know best how difficult it is, and how 
our whole life and our whole power are hardly 
sufficient to fulfil that short law. MS, 



Christ's teaching is plainly that as He is the 
Son of God so we are His brothers. His concep- 
tion of man is a new one, and as that is new, so 
must His conception of God be new. He lifts 
up humanity, and brings deity near to humanity, 
and He expresses their inseparable nature and 
their separate existences by the best simile which 
the world supplies, that of Father and Son. He 
claims no more for Himself than He claims for 
us. His only excellence is that which is due to 
Himself — His having been the first to find the 
Father, and become again His Son, and His hav- 
ing remained in life and death more one with the 
Father than any one of those who professed to 
believe in Him, and to follow His example. 

MS. 

If Jesus was not God, was He, they ask, a mere 
man ? A mere man ? Is there anything among 
the works of God, anything next to God, more 
wonderful, more awful, more holy than man ? 
Much rather should we ask, Was then Jesus a 



LIFE AND RELIGION 35 

mere God ? Look at the miserable conceptions 
which man made to himself as long as he spoke 
of gods beside God ? It could not be otherwise. 
God is one, and he who admits other gods beside 
or without Him degrades, nay, denies and destroys 
the One God. A God is less than man. True 
Christianity does not degrade the Godhead, it 
exalts manhood, by bringing it back near to God, 
as near as it is possible for human thought to 
approach the ineffable and inconceivable Majesty 
of the true God. MS. 



If I ventured to speak of God's purpose at all, 
I should say that it is not God's purpose to win 
only the spiritually gifted, the humble, the tender 
hearted, the souls that are discontented with 
their own shortcomings, the souls that find happi- 
ness in self-sacrifice — those are His already — but 
to win the intellectually gifted, the wise, the culti- 
vated, the clever, or better still, to win them both. 
It would be an evil day for Christianity if it could 
no longer win the intellectually gifted, the wise, 
the cultivated, the clever, and it seems to me the 
duty of all who really believe in Christ to show 
that Christianity, if truly understood, can win the 
highest as well as the humblest intellects. 

Gi fjord Lectures, III. 



DEATH 

Trust in God! What He does is well done. 
What we are, we are through Him; what we 
suffer, we suffer through His will. We cannot 
conceive His wisdom, we cannot fathom His 
Love, but we can trust with a trust stronger than 
all other trusts that He will not forsake us, when 
we cling to Him, and call on Him, as His Son, 
Jesus Christ, has taught us to call on Him, "Our 
Father." Though this earthly form of ours must 
perish, all that was good, and pure, and unselfish 
in us will live. Death has no power over what 
is of God within us. Death changes and purifies 
and perfects us; Death brings us nearer to God, 
where we shall meet again those that are God's, 
and love them with that godly love which can 
never perish. Life. 



Would that loving Father begin such a work 
in us, as is now going on, and then destroy it, 
leave it unfinished ? No, what is will be; what 
really is in us will always be; we shall be because 
we are. Many things which are now will change, 

36 



LIFE AND RELIGION 37 

but what we really are we shall always be; and 
if love forms really part of our very life, that 
love, changed it may be, purified, sanctified, will 
be with us, and remain with us through that 
greatest change which we call death. The pangs 
of death will be the same for all that, just as the 
pangs of childbirth seem ordained by God in 
order to moderate the exceeding joy that a child 
is born into the world. And as the pain is for- 
gotten when the child is born, so it will be after 
death — the joy will be commensurate to the sor- 
row. The sorrow is but the effort necessary to 
raise ourselves to that new and higher state of 
being, and without that supreme effort or agony, 
the new life that waits for us is beyond our hori- 
zon, beyond our conception. It is childish to 
try to anticipate, we cannot know anything about 
it; we are meant to be ignorant; even the "Divina 
Commedia" of a great poet and thinker is but 
child's play, and nothing else. . . . No illu- 
sions, no anticipations, only that certainty, that 
quiet rest in God, that submissive expectation of 
the soul, which knows that all is good, all comes 
from God, all tends to God. MS. 



As one gets older, death seems hardly to make 
so wide a gap — a few years more or less, that is 



38 LIFE AND RELIGION 

all — meantime we know in whose hands we all 
are, that life is very beautiful, but death has its 
beauty too. Life, 



We accustom ourselves so easily to life as a 
second nature, and in spite of the graves around 
us, death remains something unnatural, hard and 
terrifying. That should not be. An early death 
is terrifying, but as we grow older our thoughts 
should accustom themselves to passing away at 
the end of a long life's journey. All is so beauti- 
ful, so good, so wisely ordered, that even death 
can be nothing hard, nothing disturbing; it all 
belongs to a great plan, which we do not under- 
stand, but of which we know that it is wiser than 
all wisdom, better than all good, that it cannot 
be otherwise, cannot be better. In faith we can 
live and we can die — can even see those go before 
us who came before us, and whom we must fol- 
low. All is not according to our will, to our wisdom, 
but according to a heavenly Will, and those who 
have once found each other through God's hand 
will, clinging to His hand, find each other again. 

Ibid. 

If we are called away sooner or later we ought to 
part cheerfully, knowing that this earth could give 



LIFE AND RELIGION 39 

no more than has been ours, and looking forward 
to our new home, as to a more perfect state where 
all that was good and true and unselfish in us 
will live and expand, and all that was bad and 
mean will be purified and cast off. So let us work 
here as long as it is day, but without fearing the 
night that will lead us to a new and brighter dawn 
of life. MS. 



Annihilation ... is a word without any 
conceivable meaning. We are — that is enough. 
What we are does not depend on us; what we shall 
be neither. We may conceive the idea of change 
in form, but not of cessation or destruction of 
substance. People mean frequently by annihila- 
tion the loss of conscious personality, as distinct 
from material annihilation. What I feel about 
it is shortly this. If there is anything real and 
substantial in our conscious personality, then 
whatever there is real and substantial in it cannot 
cease to exist. If on the contrary we mean by 
conscious personality something that is the result 
of accidental circumstances, then, no doubt, we 
must face the idea of such a personality ceasing 
to be what it now is. I believe, however, that the 
true source and essence of our personality lies in 
what is the most real of all real things, and in so 



4 o LIFE AND RELIGION 

far as it is true, it cannot be destroyed. There is 
a distinction between conscious personality and 
personal consciousness. A child has personal 
consciousness, a man who is this or that, a Napo- 
leon, a Talleyrand, has conscious personality. 
Much of that conscious personality is merely 
temporary, and passes away; but the personal 
consciousness remains. Life. 



One look up to heaven, and all this dust of the 
high road of life vanishes. Yes! one look up to 
heaven and that dark shadow of death vanishes. 
We have made the darkness of that shadow our- 
selves, and our thoughts about death are very 
ungodly. God has willed it so; there is to be a 
change, and a change of such magnitude that even 
if angels were to come down and tell us all about it, 
we could not understand it, as little as the new- 
born child would understand what human language 
could tell about the present life. Think what the 
birth of a child, of a human soul, is; and when you 
have felt the utter impossibility of fathoming that 
mystery, then turn your thoughts upon death, and 
see in it a new birth equally unfathomable, but 
only the continuation of that joyful mystery 
which we call a birth. It is all God's work, and 
where is there a flaw in that wonder of all wonders, 



LIFE AND RELIGION 41 

God's ever-working work ? If people talk of the 
niseries of life are they not all man's work ? 

Ibid. 

Great happiness makes one feel so often that it 
cannot last, and that we will have some day to 
give up all to which one's heart clings so. A few 
years sooner or later, but the time will come, and 
come quicker than one expects. Therefore I 
believe it is right to accustom oneself to the 
thought that we can none of us escape death, and 
that all our happiness here is only lent us. But 
at the same time we can thankfully enjoy all that 
God gives us . . . and there is still so much 
left us, so much to be happy and thankful for, and 
yet here too the thought always rushes across one's 
brightest hours: it cannot last, it is only for a few 
years and then it must be given up. Let us work 
as long as it is day, let us try to do our duty, and 
be very thankful for God's blessings which have 
been showered upon us so richly — but let us learn 
also always to look beyond, and learn to be ready 
to give up everything — and yet say, Thy Will be 
done. MS. 



It is the most painful work I know looking 
through the papers and other things belonging to 



42 LIFE AND RELIGION 

one who is no more with us. How different every- 
thing looks to what it did before. There is one 
beautiful feature about death, it carries off all the 
small faults of the soul we loved, it makes us see 
the true littleness of little things, it takes away all 
the shadows, and only leaves the light. That is 
how it ought to be, and if in judging of a person 
we could only bring ourselves to think how we 
should judge of them if we saw them on the bed 
of death, how different life would be! We always 
judge in self-defence, and that makes our judg- 
ments so harsh. When they are gone how readily 
we forget and forgive everything, how truly we 
love all that was loveable in them, how we blame 
ourselves for our own littleness in minding this 
and that, and not simply and truly loving all 
that was good and bright and noble. How differ- 
ent life might be if we could all bring ourselves to 
be what we really are, good and loving, and could 
blow away the dust that somehow or other will 
fall on all of us. It is never too late to begin 
again. Life. 



' The death of those we love is the last lesson we 
receive in life — the rest we must learn for ourselves. 
To me, the older I grow, and the nearer I feel that 
to me the end must be, the more perfect and 



LIFE AND RELIGION 43 

beautiful all seems to be; one feels surrounded and 
supported everywhere by power, wisdom, and 
love, content to trust and wait, incapable of mur- 
muring, very helpless, very weak, yet strong in 
that very helplessness, because it teaches us to 
trust in something not ourselves. Yet parting 
with those we love is hard — only I fear there is 
nothing else that would have kept our eyes open 
to what is beyond this life. MS. 



It is strange how little we all think of death as 
the condition of all the happiness we enjoy now. 
If we could but learn to value each hour of life, 
to enjoy it fully, to use it fully, never to spoil a 
minute by selfishness, then death would never 
come too soon; it is the wasted hours w T hich are 
like death in life, and which make life really so 
short. It is not too late to learn to try to be more 
humble, more forbearing, more courteous, or, 
what is at the root of all, more loving. Life. 



The great world for which we live seems to me 
as good as the little world in which we live, and I 
have never known why faith should fail, when 
everything, even pain and sorrow, is so wonder- 
fully good and beautiful. All that we say to con- 



44 LIFE AND RELIGION 

sole ourselves on the death of those we loved, and 
who loved us, is hollow and false; the only true 
thing is rest and silence. We cannot understand, 
and therefore we must and can trust. There ca*n 
be no mistake, no gap, in the world poem to 
which we belong; and I believe that those stars 
which without their own contrivance have met 
will meet again. How, where, when ? God 
knows this, and that is enough. MS. 



God has taught us that death is not so 
terrible as it appears to most men — it is but 
a separation for a few short days, and then, 
too, eternity awaits us. Life. 



We live here in a narrow dwelling house, which 
presses us in on all sides, and yet we fancy it is the 
whole universe. But when the door opens and a 
loved one passes out, never to return, we too step 
to the door and look out into the distance, and 
realise then how small and empty the dwelling is, 
and how a larger, more beautiful world waits for 
us without. How it is in that larger world, who 
can say ? But if we were so happy in the narrow 
dwelling, how far more happy shall we be out there ! 
Be not afraid. See how beautifully all is ordered, 



LIFE AND RELIGION 45 

look up to the widespread firmament, and think 
how small it is in comparison with God's almighty 
power. He who regulates the courses of the 
stars will regulate the fate of the souls of men, and 
those souls who have once met, shall they not 
meet again like the stars ? MS. 



Those who are absent are often nearer to us 
than those who are present. MS. 



We reckon too little with death, and then when 
it comes it overwhelms us. We know all the time 
that our friends must go, and that we must go, 
but we shut our eyes, and enjoy their love and 
friendship as if life could never end. We should 
say good-bye to each other every evening — perhaps 
the last good-bye would find us then less unpre- 
pared. MS. 



There is something so natural in death. We 
come and we go, there is no break. Life. 



What is more natural in life than death ? 
and having lived this long life, so full of 



46 LIFE AND RELIGION 

light, having been led so kindly by a Fatherly 
hand through all storms and struggles, why 
should I be afraid when I have to make the last 
step ? Ibid. 



THE DEITY 

We clearly see that the possibility of intercourse 
between man and God, and a revelation of God 
to man, depends chiefly or exclusively on the 
conception which man has previously formed of 
God and man. In all theological researches we 
must carefully bear in mind that the idea of God 
is our idea, which we have formed in part through 
tradition, and in part by our own thinking. God 
is and remains our God. We can have a knowl- 
edge of Him only through our inner consciousness, 
not through our senses. Silesian Horseherd. 



Our duties toward God and man, our love for 
God and for man, are as nothing without the firm 
foundation which is formed only by our faith in 
God, as the Thinker and Ruler of the world, the 
Father of the Son, who was revealed through Him 
as the Father of all sons, of all men. Ibid. 



Though Christianity has given us a purer and 
truer idea of the Godhead, of the majesty of His 

47 



48 LIFE AND RELIGION 

power, and the holiness of His will, there remains 
with many of us the conception of a merely ob- 
jective Deity. God is still with many of us in the 
clouds, so far removed from the earth and so high 
above anything human, that in trying to realise 
fully the meaning of Christ's teaching we often 
shrink from approaching too near to the blinding 
effulgence of Jehovah. The idea that we should 
stand to Him in the relation of children to their 
father seems to some people almost irreverent, and 
the thought that God is near us everywhere, the 
belief that we are also His offspring, nay, that there 
has never been an absolute barrier between 
divinity and humanity, has often been branded as 
Pantheism. Yet Christianity would not be Chris- 
tianity without this so-called Pantheism, and it is 
only some lingering belief in something like a Jove- 
like Deus Optimus Maximus that keeps the eyes 
of our mind fixed with awe on the God of Nature 
without, rather than on the much more awful 
God of the soul within. 

Chips from a German Workshop. 

The idea of God is the result of an unbroken 
historical evolution, call it a development, an 
unveiling, or a purification, but not of a sudden 
revelation. . . . What right have we to find 
fault with the manner in which the Divine revealed 



LIFE AND RELIGION 49 

itself, first to the eyes, and then to the mind, of 
man ? Is the revelation in nature really so 
contemptible a thing that we can afford to despise 
it, or at the utmost treat it as good enough for the 
heathen world ? Our eyes must have grown very 
dim, our mind very dull, if we can no longer per- 
ceive how the heavens declare the glory of God. 

Gifford Lectures, II. 

A belief in one Supreme God, even if at first it 
was only a henotheistic, and not yet a monotheistic 
belief, took possession of the leading spirits of the 
Jewish race at a very early time. All tradition 
assigns that belief in One God, the Most High, to 
Abraham. Abraham, though he did not deny the 
existence of the gods worshipped by the neigh- 
bouring tribes, yet looked upon them as different 
from, and as decidedly inferior to, his own God. 
His monotheism was, no doubt, narrow. His 
God was the friend of Abraham, as Abraham was 
the friend of God. Yet the concept of God 
formed by Abraham was a concept that could and 
did grow. Neither Moses, nor the Prophets, nor 
Christ Himself, nor even Mohammed, had to 
introduce a new God. Their God was always 
called the God of Abraham, even when freed 
from all that was local and narrow in the faith of 
that patriarch. Ibid. 



50 LIFE AND RELIGION 

To some any attempt to trace back the name 
and concept of Jehovah to the same hidden sources 
from which other nations derived their first intima- 
tion of deity, may seem almost sacrilegious. 
They forget the difference between the human 
concept of the Deity and the Deity itself, which 
is beyond the reach of all human concepts. But 
the historian reads deeper lessons in the growth of 
these human concepts, as they spring up every- 
where in the minds of men who have been seekers 
after truth — seeking the Lord if haply they might 
feel after Him and find Him; and when he can 
show the slow but healthy growth of the noblest 
and sublimest thoughts out of small and apparently 
insignificant beginnings, he rejoices as the labourer 
rejoices over his golden harvest; nay, he often 
wonders what is more truly wonderful, the butter- 
fly that soars up to heaven on its silvery wings, or 
the grub that hides within its mean chrysalis such 
marvellous possibilities. Ibid. 



The concept of God arises by necessity in the 
human mind, and is not, as so many theologians 
will have it, the result of one special disclosure, 
granted to Jews and Christians only. It seems to 
me impossible to resist this conviction, where a 
comparative study of the great religions of the 



LIFE AND RELIGION 51 

world shows us that the highest attributes which 
we claim for the Deity are likewise ascribed to it 
by the Sacred Books of other religions. Ibid. 



We can now repeat the words which have been 
settled for us centuries ago, and which we have 
learnt by heart in our childhood — I believe in God 
the Father, Maker of heaven and earth — with the 
conviction that they express, not only the faith of 
the apostles, or of oecumenical councils, but that 
they contain the Confession of Faith of the whole 
world, expressed in different ways, conveyed in 
thousands of languages, but always embodying 
the same fundamental truth. I call it funda- 
mental, because it is founded in the very nature 
of our mind, our reason and our language, on a 
simple and ineradicable conviction that where 
there are acts there must be agents, and in the end, 
one Prime Agent, whom man may know, not indeed 
in His own inscrutable essence, yet in His acts, as 
revealed in Nature. Ibid. 



The historical proof of the existence of God, 
which is supplied to us by the history of the 
religions of the world, has never been refuted, 
and cannot be refuted. It forms the foundation 



52 LIFE AND RELIGION 

of all the other proofs, call them cosmological, 
ontological, or teleological, or rather it absorbs 
them all, and makes them superfluous. There 
are those who declare that they require no proof 
at all for the existence of a Supreme Being, or 
if they did, they would find it in revelation, and 
nowhere else. Suppose they wanted no proof 
themselves, would they really not care at all to 
know how the human race, and how they them- 
selves, came in possession of what, I suppose, 
they value as their most precious inheritance ? 
An appeal to revelation is of no avail in deciding 
questions of this kind, unless it is first explained 
what is really meant by revelation. The histoiy 
of religions teaches us that the same appeal to a 
special revelation is made, not only by Christian- 
ity, but by the defenders of Brahmanism, Zoroas- 
trianism and Mohammedanism, and where is the 
tribunal to adjudicate on the conflicting appeals 
of these and other claimants ? The followers of 
every one of these religions declare their belief in 
the revealed character of their own religion, 
never in that of any other religion. There is, 
no doubt, a revelation to which we may appeal 
in the court of our own conscience, but before 
the court of universal appeal we require differ- 
ent proofs for the faith that is in us. 

Gifjord Lectures, III, 



LIFE AND RELIGION 53 

Given man, such as he is, and given the world, 
such as it is, a belief in divine beings, and, at last, 
in one Divine Being, is not only a universal, but 
an inevitable fact. ... If from the stand- 
point of human reason, no flaw can be pointed 
out in the intellectual process which led to the 
admission of something within, behind, or beyond 
nature, call it the Infinite or any other name you 
like, it follows that the history of that process is 
really, at the same time, the best proof of the 
legitimacy and truth of the conclusions to which 
it has led. Ibid. 



There is no predicate in human language 
worthy of God, all we can say of Him is what the 
Upanishads said of Him, No, No! What does 
that mean ? It meant that if God is called all- 
powerful, we have to say No, because whatever 
we comprehend by powerful is nothing compared 
with the power of God. If God is called all- 
wise, we have again to say No, because what we 
call wisdom cannot approach the wisdom of God. 
If God is called holy, again we have to say No, 
for what can our conception of holiness be, com- 
pared with the holiness of God ? This is what 
the thinkers of the Upanishads meant when they 
said that all we can say of God is No, No. Ibid. 



54 LIFE AND RELIGION 

If people would only define what they mean 
by knowing, they would shrink from the very 
idea that God can ever be known by us in the 
same sense in which everything else is known, or 
that with regard to Him we could ever be any- 
thing but Agnostics. All human knowledge begins 
with the senses, and goes on from sensations to 
percepts, from percepts to concepts and names. 
And yet the same people who insist that they 
know God, will declare in the same breath that 
no one can see God and live. Let us only define 
the meaning of knowing, and keep the different 
senses in which this word has been used care- 
fully apart, and I doubt whether anyone would 
venture to say that, in the true sense of the word, 
he is not an Agnostic as regards the true nature 
of God. This silence before a nameless Being 
does not exclude a true belief in God, nor devo- 
tion, nor love of a Being beyond our senses, beyond 
our understanding, beyond our reason, and there- 
fore beyond all names. Ibid. 



Every one of the names given to this infinite 
Being by finite beings marks a stage in the evolu- 
tion of religious truth. If once we try to under- 
stand these names, we shall find that they were 
all well meant, that, for the time being, they were 



LIFE AND RELIGION 55 

probably the only possible names. The Histor- 
ical School does not look upon all the names given 
to divine powers as simply true, or simply false. 
We look upon all of them as well meant and true 
for the time being, as steps on the ladder on which 
the angels of God ascend and descend. There 
was no harm in the ancient people, when they 
were thirsting for rain, invoking the sky, and say- 
ing, "O dear sky, send us rain!" And when 
after a time they used more and more general 
words, when they addressed the powers (of nature) 
as bright, or rich, or mighty, all these were meant 
for something else, for something they were seek- 
ing for, if haply they might feel after Him and 
find Him. This is St. Paul's view of the growth 
of religion. Ibid. 



When God has once been conceived without 
"any manner of similitude," He may be med- 
itated on, revered, and adored, but that fervent 
passion of the human breast, that love with all 
our heart, and all our soul, and all our might, 
seems to become hushed before that solemn pres- 
ence. We may love our father and mother with 
all our heart, we may cling to our children with 
all our soul, we may be devoted to wife, or hus- 
band, or friend, with all our might, but to throw 



56 LIFE AND RELIGION 

all these feelings in their concentrated force and 
truth on the Deity has been given to very few on 
earth. Ibid, 



If the history of religion has taught us any- 
thing, it has taught us to distinguish between the 
names and the thing named. The names may 
change, and become more and more perfect, and 
our concepts of the deity may become more perfect 
also, but the deity itself is not affected by our 
names. However much the names may differ and 
change, there remains, as the last result of the 
study of religion, the everlasting conviction that 
behind all the names there is something named, 
that there is an agent behind all acts, that there 
is an Infinite behind the Finite, that there is a 
God in Nature; that God is the abiding goal of 
many names, all well meant and well aimed, and 
yet all far, far away from the goal which no man 
can see and live. All names that human language 
has invented may be imperfect. But the name 
"I am that I am" will remain for those who 
think Semitic thought, while to those who 
speak Aryan languages it will be difficult to 
invent a better name than the Vedanta Sa£- 
&id-ananda, He who is, who knows, who is 
blessed. Ibid. 



LIFE AND RELIGION 57 

However much we may cease to speak the lan- 
guage of the faith of our childhood, the faith in 
a superintending and ever-present Providence 
grows only stronger the more we see of life, the 
more we know of ourselves. When that bass- 
note is right, we may indulge in many variations 
— we shall never go entirely wrong. MS. 



We do not see the hand that takes our dear ones 
from us, but we know whose hand it is, whose will 
it is. We have no name for Him, we do not know 
Him, but we know that whatever name we give, 
He will understand it. That is the foundation of 
all religion. Let us give the best name we can find 
in us, let us know that even that must be a very 
imperfect name, but let us trust that if we only 
believe in that name, if we use it, not because it is 
the fashion, but because we can find no better name, 
He will understand and forgive. Every name is 
true, if we are true; every name is false, if we are 
false. If we are true, our religion is true; if we 
are false our religion is false. An honest fetish 
worshipper even is better than a scoffing Pope. 

MS. 

In the ordinary sense of knowledge, we cannot 
have any knowledge of God; our very idea of 



58 LIFE AND RELIGION 

God implies that He is beyond our powers of 
perception and understanding. Then what can 
we do ? Shut our eyes and be silent ? That will 
not satisfy creatures such as we are. We must 
speak, but all our words apply to things percepti- 
ble or intelligible. The old Buddhists used to 
say, The only thing we can say of God is No, No ! 
He is not this, He is not that. Whatever we can 
see or understand, He is not that. But again I 
say that kind of self-denial will not satisfy such 
creatures as we are. What can we do ? We 
can only give the best we have. Now the best 
we have or know on earth is Love, therefore we 
say God is Love or loving. Love is entire self- 
surrender, we can go no further in our conception 
of what is best. And yet how poor a name it is 
in comparison of what we want to name. Our 
idea of love includes humility, a looking up and 
worshipping. Can we say that of God's love ? 
Depend upon it, the best we say is but poor 
endeavour — it is well we should know it — and 
yet, if it is the best we have and can give, we need 
not be ashamed. Life. 



And now that generations after generations 
have passed away, with their languages — adoring 
and worshipping the Name of God — preaching 



LIFE AND RELIGION 59 

and dying in the Name of God — thinking and 
meditating on the Name of God — there the old 
word stands still, breathing to us the pure air of 
the dawn of humanity, carrying with it all the 
thoughts and sighs, the doubts and tears, of our 
bygone brethren, and still rising up to heaven 
with the same sound from the basilicas of Rome 
and the temples of Benares, as if embracing by 
its simple spell millions and millions of hearts in 
their longing desire to give utterance to the unutter- 
able, to express the inexpressible. Ibid. 



THE DIVINE 

It was, after all, the Jew who, in the great 
history of the world, was destined to solve the 
riddle of the Divine in man. It was the soil of 
Jewish thought that in the end gave birth to the 
true conception of the relation between the Divine 
in nature and the Divine in man. 

Gifford Lectures, III. 



When the Divine in the outward world has once 
been fully recognised, there can be nothing more 
or less divine, nothing more or less miraculous, 
either in nature or in history. Those who assign 
a divine and miraculous character to certain con- 
secrated events only in the history of the world, 
are in great danger of desecrating thereby the 
whole drama of history, and of making it, not only 
profane, but godless. It is easy to call this a 
pantheistic view of the world. It is pantheistic, 
in the best sense of the word, so much so that any 
other view would soon become atheistic. Even 
the Greeks suspected the omnipresence of the 
Divine, when, as early as the time of Thales, they 

60 



LIFE AND RELIGION 61 

declared that all is full of the gods. The choice 
here lies really between Pantheism and Atheism. 
If anything, the greatest or the smallest, can ever 
happen without the will of God, then God is no 
longer God. To distinguish between a direct and 
indirect influence of the Divine, to admit a general 
and a special providence, is like a relapse into 
Polytheism, a belief in one and many gods. 

Ibid. 

Human nature is divine nature modified. It 
can be nothing else. Christ, in shaking off all 
that is not Divine in man, let us call it by one 
general name, all that is selfish, resumed His own 
divinity. MS. 



God comes to us in the likeness of man — there 
is no other likeness for God. And that likeness 
is not forbidden; Christ has taught us to see and 
love God in man. We cannot go further. If 
we attempt to conceive anything more than 
human, our mind breaks down. But we can con- 
ceive and perceive the Divine in man, and most 
in those who are risen from the earth. While 
we live our love is human, and mixed with earthly 
things. We love and do not love — we even hate, 
or imagine we do. But we do not really hate 



62 LIFE AND RELIGION 

any man, we only hate something that surrounds 
and hides man. What is behind, the true nature 
of man, we always love. Death purifies man, 
it takes away the earthly crust, and we can love 
those who are dead far better than those who are 
still living: that is the truth. We do not deceive 
ourselves, we do not use vain words. Love is 
really purer, stronger and more unselfish, when 
it embraces those who are risen. That is why 
the Apostles loved Christ so much better when 
He was no longer with them. While He lived, 
Peter could deny Him — when He had returned to 
the Father, Peter was willing to die for Him. All 
that is so true, only one must have gone through 
it, felt it oneself in order to understand it. If one 
knows the love one feels for the blessed, one 
wants no temporary resurrection to account for 
the re-kindled love of the Apostles. They believed 
that Christ had truly risen, that death had no power 
over Him, that He was with the Father. Was 
not that more, far more, than a return to this 
fleeting life for a few hours, or days, or weeks, 
or than an ascent through the clouds to the blue 
sky ? Ah ! how the great truths have been ex- 
changed for small fancies, the mira for the miracula. 

MS. 



DOUBTS 

There is an atheism which is unto death, there 
is another atheism which is the life blood of all 
true faith. It is the power of giving up what, in 
our best, our most honest, moments, we know to 
be no longer true; it is the readiness to replace 
the less perfect, however dear, however sacred 
it may have been to us, by the more perfect, 
however much it may be detested, as yet, by the 
world. It is the true self-surrender, the true self- 
sacrifice, the truest trust in truth, the truest faith. 
Without that atheism religion would long ago 
have become a petrified hypocrisy; without that 
atheism no new religion, no reform, no reforma- 
tion, no resuscitation would ever have been possi- 
ble; without that atheism no new life is possible 
for any one of us. Htbbert Lectures. 



There is certainly no happier life than a life of 
simple faith; of literal acceptance, of rosy dreams. 
We must all grant that, if it were possible, nothing 
would be more perfect. I gladly acknowledge 
that some of the happiest, and also some of the 

63 



64 LIFE AND RELIGION 

best men and women I have known, were those 
who would have shrunk with horror from ques- 
tioning a single letter of the Bible, or doubting 
that a serpent actually spoke to Eve, and an ass 
to Balaam. But can we prevent the light of the 
sun and the noises of the street from waking the 
happy child from his heavenly dreams ? Nay, 
is it not our duty to wake the child, when the time 
has come that he must be up and doing, and take 
his share in the toils of the day ? And is it not 
well for those who for the first time open their 
eyes and look around, that they should see by 
their side some who have woke before them, who 
understand their inquiring looks, and can answer 
their timid questions and tell them in the simple- 
hearted language of the old poet: 

"There lives more faith in honest doubt, 
Believe me, than in half the creeds." 

Gifford Lectures, III. 

How many men in all countries and all ages have 
been called atheists, not because they denied that 
there existed anything beyond the visible and the 
finite, or because they declared that the world, 
such as it was, could be explained without a cause, 
without a purpose, without a God, but often be- 
cause they differed only from the traditional con- 



LIFE AND RELIGION 65 

ception of the Deity prevalent at the time, and 
were yearning after a higher conception of God 
than what they had learnt in their childhood. 

Ibid. 

There are moments in our life when those who 
seek most earnestly after God think they are for- 
saken of God; when they hardly venture to ask 
themselves, Do I then believe in God, or do I not ? 
Let them not despair, and let us not judge harshly 
of them; their despair may be better than many 
creeds. . . . Honest doubt is the deepest 
spring of honest faith; only he who has lost can find. 

Ibid. 

If we have once claimed the freedom of the 
spirit which St. Paul claimed: to prove all things 
and hold fast that which is good: we cannot turn 
back, we cannot say that no one shall prove our 
own religion, no one shall prove other religions 
and compare them with our own. We have to 
choose once for all between freedom and slavery 
of judgment, and though I do not wish to argue 
with those who prefer slavery, yet one may remind 
them that even they, in deliberately choosing slav- 
ery, follow their own private judgment, quite as 
much as others do in choosing freedom. 

Gifjord Lectures, III. 



66 LIFE AND RELIGION 

Our own self interest surely would seem to sug- 
gest as severe a trial of our own religion as of other 
religions, nay, even a more severe trial. Our 
religion has sometimes been compared to a good 
ship that is to carry us through the waves and tem- 
pests of this life to a safe haven. Would it not be 
wise, therefore, to have it tested, and submitted to 
the severest trials, before we intrust ourselves and 
those dear to us to such a vessel. And remember, 
all men, except those who take part in the founda- 
tion of a new religion, or have been converted from 
an old to a new faith, have to accept their religious 
belief on trust, long before they are able to judge 
for themselves. And while in all other matters an 
independent judgment in riper years is encouraged, 
every kind of influence is used to discourage a free 
examination of religious dogmas, once engrafted 
on our intellect in its tenderest stage. We con- 
demn an examination of our own religion, even 
though it arises from an honest desire to see with 
our own eyes the truth which we mean to hold fast; 
and yet we do not hesitate to send missionaries into 
all the world, asking the faithful to re-examine 
their own time-honoured religions. We attack 
their most sacred convictions, we wound their ten- 
derest feelings, we undermine the belief in which 
they have been brought up, and we break up the 
peace and happiness of their homes. Yet, if some 



LIFE AND RELIGION 67 

learned Jew, or subtle Brahman, or outspoken 
Zulu, asks us to re-examine the date and author- 
ship of the Old or New Testament, or challenges 
us to produce the evidence on which we also are 
quite ready to accept certain miracles, we are 
offended, forgetting that with regard to these ques- 
tions we can claim no privilege, no immunity. 

Ibid. 

If we can respect a childlike and even a childish 
faith, we ought likewise to learn to respect even a 
philosophical atheism which often contains the 
hidden seeds of the best and truest faith. We 
ought never to call a man an atheist, and say that 
he does not believe in God, till we know what kind 
of God it is he has been brought up to believe in, 
and what kind of God it is that he rejects, it may 
be, from the best and highest motives. We ought 
never to forget that Socrates was called an atheist, 
that the early Christians were all called atheists, 
that some of the best and greatest men this world 
has ever known have been branded by that name. 

Ibid. 

I have heard and read the worst that can be said 
against our religion — I mean the true original 
teaching of Christ — and I feel that I am ready in 
mind, if not in body, to lay down my life for the 



68 LIFE AND RELIGION 

truth of His teaching. All our difficulties arise 
from the doctrines of men, not from His doctrine. 
There is no outward evidence of the truth of His 
doctrine, but the Spirit of God that is within us 
testifieth to its truth. If it does not, we are not yet 
disciples of Christ, but we may be hereafter. 

Life. 

Be certain of this, that to repress a doubt is to 
repress the spirit of truth; a doubt well spoken 
out is generally a doubt solved. But all this re- 
quires great seriousness of mind — it must assume 
an importance greater than anything else in life, 
and then we can fight our way through it. God 
is with us in our struggles. Ibid, 



EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 

Evolution is really the same as history, if we 
take it in its objective sense. Subjectively, history 
meant originally inquiry, or a desire to know; it 
then came to mean knowledge, obtained by inquiry; 
and lastly, in a purely objective sense, the objects 
of such knowledge. Gifford Lectures, I. 



We may discover in all the errors of mythology, 
and in what we call the false or pagan religions of 
this world, a progress toward truth, a yearning 
after something more than finite, a growing recog- 
nition of the Infinite, throwing off some of its veils 
before our eyes, and from century to century reveal- 
ing itself to us more and more in its own purity and 
holiness. And thus the two concepts, that of evo- 
lution and that of revelation, which seem at first 
so different, become one in the end. If there is a 
purpose running through the ages, if nature is not 
blind, if there are agents, recognised at last as the 
agents of one Will, behind the whole phenomenal 
world, then the evolution of man's belief in that 
Supreme Will is itself the truest revelation of that 

69 



70 LIFE AND RELIGION 

Supreme Will, and must remain the adamantine 
foundation on which all religion rests, whether we 
call it natural or supernatural. 

Gi fjord Lectures y II. 

The same changes in the idea of God, which we 
see in the different books of the Bible, take place 
in the different chapters of our own life. The 
child cannot but represent God to himself as a 
venerable man, walking about, warning and 
reproving the creatures He has made. The child 
has no higher conception as yet, which it could 
apply to God ; if it heard of a higher one it could not 
grasp it. But as the child grows and gathers in 
higher conceptions, the lower must give way to the 
higher. As long as the evidence of the senses is 
the only evidence which a child knows, he demands 
a visible God. When he learns that the human 
senses are different modes of apprehension, that 
according to their very nature they can never 
apprehend except what is limited, then the mind 
involuntarily surrenders the visible God, it believes 
in God as a Spirit. And so the growth of each 
man, and the growth of the whole human race, 
goes on, and will go on, and I cannot see how, if 
the world goes on as it has hitherto, it can be other- 
wise but that much of the language of the New 
Testament also will have to be surrendered. 



LIFE AND RELIGION 71 

Changes have lately taken place with the word 
person! Many things which were formerly com- 
prehended under personality, have been discovered 
to be mere accessories, and above the more mate- 
rial conception of personality, of individuality, or 
of the I, a higher one is rising, that of the Self. 
The I, the personality, is made up of many things 
which are purely temporal — which are dear to us 
on earth, but which will pass away, while the Self 
will abide for ever. Need we wonder therefore 
that just those who wish to transfer only their 
highest to the Godhead begin to shrink from 
speaking of a personal God ? or insist on defining 
the word personal so that it should exclude all 
that is incompatible with a perfect, unlimited, 
unchanging Being ? What led to such expressions 
as, God is Love, but a feeling of reverence, which 
shrank from speaking of God as loving as we love ? 
This process will go on as long as the thoughts and 
words of mankind grow and change. Let us learn 
only from the Bible that those who spoke of God 
as walking about in Paradise, spoke as children, 
did the best they could, gave all they had, and who 
shall say that their two mites were in the sight of 
God less precious than all our creeds and philos- 
ophies ? They too will change, they too will be 
looked upon by future generations as the language 
of children. But He to whom our thoughts and 



72 LIFE AND RELIGION 

prayers are addressed will interpret all languages 
and dialects. Before Him the wisdom of the man 
will not sound much wiser than the trustful ignor- 
ance of the child. MS. 



FAITH 

Next to our faith in God there is nothing so 
essential to the healthy growth of our whole being 
as an unshaken faith in man. 

Chips from a German Workshop. 

Let us trust in Him to whom alone we owe all 
our blessings — if we do not forsake Him, He will 
never forsake us — we cannot fathom His love, but 
we can trust. MS. 



Separation loses its bitterness when we have 
faith in each other and in God. Faith in each 
other keeps us close together in life, and faith in 
God keeps us together in eternity. MS. 



Those who remember the happiness of the 
simple faith of their childhood may well ask 
why it should ever be disturbed. Knowing 
the blessedness of that faith we naturally abstain 
from everything that might disturb it pre- 
maturely in the minds of those who are 

73 



74 LIFE AND RELIGION 

intrusted to us. But, as the child, whether 
he likes it or not, grows to be a man, so 
the faith of a child grows into the faith of 
a man. It is not our doing, it is the work 
of Him who made us what we are. As all 
our other ideas grow and change, so does 
our idea of God. I know there are men and 
women who, when they perceive the first warn- 
ings of that inward growth, become frightened 
and suppress it with all their might. They 
shut their eyes and ears to all new light from 
within and from without. They wish to remain 
as happy as children, and many of them 
succeed in remaining as good as children. Who 
would blame them or disturb them ? But those 
who trust in God and God's work within them, 
must go forth to the battle. With them it would 
be cowardice and faithlessness to shrink from the 
trial. They are not certain that they were meant 
to be here simply to enjoy the happiness of a child- 
like faith. They feel they have a talent committed 
to them which must not be wrapped up in a napkin. 
But the battle is hard, and all the harder because 
while they know they are obeying the voice of 
truth, which is the voice of God, many of those 
whom they love look upon them as disobeying the 
voice of God, as disturbers of the peace, as giving 
offence to those little ones. MS. 



LIFE AND RELIGION 



75 



There is a difference between the childlike faith 
of a man (all real faith must be childlike) and the 
childlike faith of a child. The one is Paradise 
not yet Lost, the other Paradise lost but regained. 
The one is right for the child, the other is right for 
the man. It is the will of God that it should be so 
— but it is also the will of God that we should all 
bear with each other, and join, each in his own 
voice, in the great hymn of praise. MS. 



Faith is that organ of knowledge by which we 
apprehend the Infinite, namely, whatever tran- 
scends the ken of our senses and the grasp of our 
reason. The Infinite is hidden from the senses, 
it is denied by Reason, but it is perceived by Faith; 
and it is perceived, if once perceived, as underlying 
both the experience of the senses and the combina- 
tions of reason. Science of Language. 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD 

Wherever our Father leads us there is our 
Fatherland. Life. 



Man must discover that God is his Father before 
he can become a son of God. To know is here to 
be, to be to know. No mere miracle will make 
man the son of God. That sonship can be gained 
through knowledge only, "through man knowing 
God, or rather being known of God," and till it is 
so gained, it does not exist, even though it be a 
fact. If we apply this to the words in which 
Christ speaks of Himself as the Son of God, we 
shall see that to Him it is no miracle, it is no mys- 
tery, it is no question of supernatural contrivance; 
it is simply clear knowledge, and it was this self- 
knowledge which made Christ what He was, it 
was this which constituted His true, His eternal 
divinity. Gifford Lectures, III. 



76 



FUTURE LIFE 

One wonders indeed how kindred souls become 
separated, and one feels startled and repelled at 
the thought that, such as they were on earth, they 
can never meet again. And yet there is continuity 
in the world, there is no flaw, no break anywhere, 
and what has been will surely be again, though 
how it will be we cannot know, and if only we trust 
in the Wisdom that pervades and overshadows the 
whole Universe, we need not know. 

Auld Lang Syne. 

Even if we resign ourselves to the thought that 
the likenesses and likelihoods which we project 
upon the unseen and unknown, nay, that the hope 
of our meeting again as we once met on earth, 
need not be fulfilled exactly as we shape them to 
ourselves, where is the argument to make us believe 
that the real fulfilment can be less perfect than 
what even a weak human heart devises and desires ? 
This trust that whatever is will be best, is what is 
meant by faith, true, because inevitable, faith. 
We see traces of it in many places and many 
religions, but I doubt whether anywhere that faith 

77 



78 LIFE AND RELIGION 

is more simply and more powerfully expressed than 
in the Old and New Testaments: "For since the 
beginning of the world men have not heard, nor 
perceived by the ear, neither hath the eye seen, 
Oh God beside Thee, what He hath prepared for 
him that waiteth for Him" (Isaiah, lxiv. 4). "As 
it is written, Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, 
neither have entered into the heart of man, the 
things which God hath prepared for them that 
love Him" (I. Cor. ii., 9). 

Hibbert Lectures, 

The highest which man can comprehend is 
man. One step only he may go beyond, and say 
that what is beyond may be different, but it can- 
not be less perfect than the present; the future 
cannot be worse than the past. . . . That 
much-decried philosophy of evolution, if it teaches 
us anything, teaches us a firm belief in a better 
future, and in a higher perfection which man is 
destined to reach. Ibid. 



In our longings for the departed we often think 
of them as young or old; we think of them as man 
or woman, as father or mother, as husband or 
wife. Even nationality and language are sup- 
posed to remain after death, and we often hear 



LIFE AND RELIGION 79 

expressions, "Oh! if the souls are without all 
this, without age, and sex, and national character, 
without even their native language, what will 
they be to us?" The answer is, they will really 
be the same to us they were in this life. Unless 
we can bring ourselves to believe that a soul has 
a beginning, and that our soul sprang into being 
at the time of our birth, the soul within us must 
have existed before. But however convinced we 
may be of the soul's eternal existence, we shall 
always remain ignorant as to how it existed. And 
yet we do not murmur or complain. Our soul 
on awakening here is not quite a stranger to itself, 
and the souls who as our parents, our wives, and 
husbands, our children, and our friends, have 
greeted us at first as strangers in this life, have 
become to us as if we had known them forever, 
and as if we could never lose them again. If it 
were to be so again in the next life, if there also 
we should meet at first as strangers till drawn 
together by the same mysterious love that has 
drawn us together here, why should we murmur 
or complain ? Thousands of years ago we read 
of a husband telling his wife, "Verily a wife is 
not dear that you may love the wife, but that you 
may love the soul, therefore a wife is dear." 
What does that mean ? It means that true love 
consists not in loving what is perishable, but in 



80 LIFE AND RELIGION 

discovering and loving what is eternal in man or 
woman. In Sanscrit that eternal part is called 
by many names, but the best seems that used in 
this passage, Atma. We translate it by Soul, 
but it is even higher and purer than Soul, it is 
best translated by the word Self. That which 
constitutes the true Self, the looker on, the witness 
within us, that which is everywhere in the body 
and yet nowhere to be touched, that which cannot 
die or expire, because it never breathed, that is 
the Infinite in man which philosophers have been 
groping for, though "he is not far from every one 
of us." It is the Divine or God-like in man. 

Gifford Lectures, III. 

The southern Aryans were absorbed in the 
struggles of thought; their past is the problem of 
creation, their future the problem of existence, 
and the present, which ought to be the solution 
of both, seems never to have attracted their atten- 
tion or called forth their energies. There never 
was a nation believing so firmly in another 
world, and so little concerned about this. Their 
condition on earth was to them a problem; their 
real and eternal life a simple fact. Though this 
is true chiefly before they were brought in contact 
with foreign conquerors, traces of this character 
are still visible in the Hindus as described by the 



LIFE AND RELIGION 81 

companions of Alexander, nay, even in the Hindus 
of the present day. The only sphere in which the 
Indian mind finds itself at liberty to act, to create, 
and to worship, is the sphere of religion and 
philosophy, and nowhere have religious and meta- 
physical ideas struck root so deeply in the mind of a 
nation as in India. History supplies no second in- 
stance where the inward life of the soul has so com- 
pletely absorbed all the other faculties of a people. 

India, 

Our happiness here is but a foretaste of our 
blessed life hereafter. We must never forget that. 
We shall be called away, but we shall meet again. 

Life. 

We must have patience — and we all cling to 
life as long as there are those who love us 
here. Those who love us there are always ours. 
Nothing is lost in the world. How it will be, 
we know not, but if we have recognised the work- 
ing of a divine wisdom and love here on earth, 
we can take comfort, and wait patiently for that 
which is to come. Ibid. 



Truly those who die young are blest. And 
shall we find them again such as they left us ? 



8z LIFE AND RELIGION 

Why not ? It is really here on earth that those 
whom we love change, it is here that they die 
every day. . . . Where are all those bright 
joyous faces which we look at when we open our 
photograph books from year to year ? On earth 
they are lost, but are they not treasured up for 
another life, where we shall be not only what we 
are from day to day, never the same to-morrow 
as we were yesterday, but where we are at once 
all that we can be — where memory is not different 
from perception, nor our wills different from our 
acts ? We shall soon know — till then surely we 
have a right to be what we are, and to cling to 
our human hopes. The more human they are, 
the nearer the truth they are likely to be. 

Ibid. 

I believe in all our hopes we cannot be human 
enough. Let us be what we are — men, feel as 
men, sorrow as men, hope as men. It is true 
our hopes are human, but what are the doubts 
and difficulties ? Are they not human too ? Shall 
we meet again as we left ? Why not ? We do 
not know how it will be so, but who has a right 
to say it cannot be so ? Let us imagine and hope 
for the best that, as men, we can conceive, and 
then rest convinced that it will be a thousand 
times better. Ibid. 



LIFE AND RELIGION S 3 

The inward voice never suggested or allowed 
me the slightest doubt or misgiving about the 
reality of a future life. If there is continuity in 
the world everywhere why should there be a 
wrench and annihilation only with us ? It will 
be as it has been — that is the lesson we 
learn from nature — how it will be we are not 
meant to know. There is an old Greek saying 
to the effect, to try to know what the gods 
did not tell us, is not piety. If God wished 
us to know what is to be, He would tell us. 
Darwin has shown us that there is continuity 
from beginning to end. Ibid. 



I believe in the continuity of Self. If there 
were an annihilation or complete change of our 
individual self-consciousness we might become 
somebody else, but we should not be ourselves. 
Personally, I have no doubt of the persistence of 
the individual after death, as we call it. I 
cannot imagine the very crown and flower 
of creation being destroyed by its author. I 
do not say it is impossible, it is not for us to 
say either yes or no; we have simply to trust, 
but that trust or faith is implanted in us, and 
is strengthened by everything around us. 

Ibid. 



84 LIFE AND RELIGION 

Do we really lose those who are called before 
us ? I feel that they are even nearer to us than 
when they were with us in life. We must take a 
larger view. Our life does not end here, if only 
we can see that our horizon here is but like a cur- 
tain that separates us from what is beyond. Those 
who go before us are beyond our horizon at pres- 
ent, but we have no right to suppose that they 
have completely vanished. We cannot see them, 
that is all. And even that, we know, can last for 
a short time only. We have lived and done our 
work in life, before we knew those we loved, and 
we may have to live the same number of years 
separated from them. But nothing can be lost: 
it depends on ourselves to keep those we loved 
always near to our thoughts, even though our 
eyes look in vain for them. The world is larger 
than this little earth, our thoughts go further than 
this short life, and if we can but find our home 
in this larger world, we shall find that this larger 
home is full of those whom we loved, and who 
loved us. There is no chance in life; a few years 
more, a few years less, will seem as nothing to us 
hereafter. Ibid. 



I fully take in the real death (of my child), I 
know I shall follow and die the same real death, 



LIFE AND RELIGION 85 

and through that same real death I trust the spirit 
of Christ will be my guide and helper, and bring 
me to a better life, and unite me again with 
those whom I have loved, and whom I love still, 
and those who have loved me and love me still. 
God is no giver of imperfect gifts, and He has 
given me life, but life on earth is imperfect. He 
has given me love, but love on earth is imperfect. 
I believe, I must believe in perfection, and there- 
fore I believe in a life perfected, and in a love 
perfected. "Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders 
— Gott belfe mir,Amen" MS. 



It seems hard, it seems so unintelligible, so far 
above us, that we should know nothing at all of 
what is to come — that we should be so com- 
pletely separated for a time from those whom we 
love. Whence all these limits ? Whence all those 
desires in us that cannot be fulfilled ? The limits 
teach us one lesson, that we are in the hands of a 
Higher Power. Wonderful as our body and our 
senses are, they are a prison and chains, and they 
could not be meant for anything else. MS. 



Of what is to come, what is in store for us, we 
know nothing, and the more we know that, the 



86 LIFE AND RELIGION 

greater and stronger our faith. It must be right, 
it cannot be wrong. Why was the past often so 
beautiful ? Because all tends to beauty, to per- 
fection, and the highest point of perfection is love. 
We are far from that here, yet all the miseries of 
this life, or many at least, would vanish before 
love. Life seems most unnatural in what we call 
the most highly civilised countries — the struggle 
of life is fiercest there. Rest and love seem impos- 
sible, and yet that is what we are yearning for, 
and it may be granted us hereafter. MS. 



How is it that we know so little of life after 
death — that we can hardly imagine anything 
without feeling that it is all human poetry ? We 
are to believe the best, but nothing definite, 
nothing that can be described. It is the same 
with God, we are to believe the best we can 
believe, and yet all is earthly, human, weak. We 
are in a dark prison here; let us believe that out- 
side it there is no darkness but light — but what 
light, who knows ? MS. 



Wait, wait, do not ask. Children ask every 
year what the Christ Child will bring them, but 
they are not told, they wait in the dark room. 



LIFE AND RELIGION 87 

Every year they expect something quite new, 
but it is always the same old Christmas Tree, 
with its lights and flowers, and all the rest. And 
why should it be so different when the door opens, 
and we step out of this dark life into the bright 
room ? Why should all be different ? We have 
stepped into this dark room here on earth, and 
how often did we think it was very bright, and 
very warm. We shall step into another room, and it 
will be brighter, warmer, more pure, more perfect. 

MS. 

What is past, present, future ? Is it not all 
one — only the past and the future somewhere 
where at present we cannot be ? Wait a little 
time, and the eternal will take place of the pres- 
ent — and we shall have the past again — for the 
past is not lost. Nothing is lost — but this waiting 
is sometimes very hard, and this longing very 
hard. Friends go on all sides, it seems a different 
world, yet there is work to do, and there is much 
left to love. MS. 



If immortality is meant for no more than a con- 
tinuance of existence, if by a belief in immortality 
on the part of the Jews is meant no more than 
that the Jews did not believe in the annihilation 



88 LIFE AND RELIGION 

of the soul at the time of death, we may con- 
fidently assert that, to the bulk of the Jewish 
nation, this very idea of annihilation was as yet 
unfamiliar. The fact is that the idea of absolute 
annihilation and nothingness is hardly ever found 
except among people whose mind has received 
some amount of philosophical education, cer- 
tainly more than what the Jews possessed in early 
times. The Jews did not believe in the utter 
destruction of the soul, but, on the other hand, 
their idea of life after death was hardly that of 
life at all. It was existence without life. Death 
was considered by them, as by the Greeks, as the 
greatest of misfortunes. To rejoice in death is 
a purely Christian, not a Jewish, idea. Though 
the Jews believed that the souls continued to 
exist in Sheol, they did not believe that the wicked 
would there be punished and the good rewarded. 
All rewards and punishments for virtue or vice 
were confined to this world, and a long life was 
regarded as a sure proof of the favour of Jehovah. 
It was the Jewish conception of God, as infinitely 
removed from this world, that made a belief in 
true immortality almost impossible for them, and 
excluded all hope for a nearer approach to God, 
or for any share in that true immortality which 
belonged to Him and to Him alone. 

Gifford Lectures, III. 



LIFE AND RELIGION 89 

Our angels live in heaven, not on earth. We 
only recognise the angelic in man, even in those 
we love the most, when we can no longer see them. 
They are then nearer us than ever, we love them 
more than ever. Happy are those who have such 
angels in heaven, who draw our hearts away from 
earth and fill them with longing for our true 
home. They lighten the burden of life, they give a 
quiet, gentle tone to the joys of life, and they teach 
us to love those who are left to us on earth, it may 
be but for a few days or years, with a love which we 
never knew before, a love which bears all things, 
believes all things, and gladly pardons all things. 

MS. 

Life eternal. Why do we so seldom face the 
great problem ? With me the chief reason was 
the conviction that we can know nothing — that 
we must wait and trust — do our work for the day 
which is — and believe that nothing can happen 
to us unless God wills it. Know, where knowledge is 
possible; believe, trust, where faith only is possible. 

MS. 

I know we shall meet again, for God does not 
destroy what He has made, nor do souls meet by 
accident. This life is full of riddles, but divine 
riddles have a divine solution. Life. 



THE INFINITE 

Though we cannot know things finite, as they 
are in themselves, we know at all events that they 
are. And this applies to our perception of the 
Infinite also. We do not know through our senses 
what it is, but we know through our very senses 
that it is. We feel the pressure of the Infinite in 
the Finite, and unless we had that feeling, we should 
have no true and safe foundation for whatever we 
may afterward believe of the Infinite. Some 
critics have urged that what I call the Infinite 
. . . is the Indefinite only. Of course it is. 
. . . We can know the Infinite as the In- 
definite only, or as the partially defined. We try 
to define it, and to know it more and more, but we 
never finish it. The whole history of religion 
represents the continuous progress of the human 
definition of the Infinite, but however far that 
definition may advance, it will never exhaust the 
Infinite. Could we define it all, it would cease 
to be the Infinite, it would cease to be the 
Unknown, it would cease to be the Incon- 
ceivable or the Divine . 

Chips from a German Workshop. 
90 



LIFE AND RELIGION 91 

What we feel through the pressure on all our 
senses is the pressure of the Infinite. Our senses, 
if I may say so, feel nothing but the Infinite, and 
out of that plenitude they apprehend the Finite. 
To apprehend the Finite is the same as to define 
the Infinite. Ibid. 



We accept the primitive savage with nothing but 
his five senses. These five senses supply him with 
a knowledge of finite things; the problem is how 
such a being ever comes to think or speak of any- 
thing not finite, but infinite. It is his senses 
which give him the first impression of infinite things 
and force him to the admission of the Infinite. 
Everything of which his senses cannot perceive 
a limit is to a primitive savage, or to any man in an 
early stage of intellectual activity, unlimited or 
infinite. Man sees to a certain point; and there 
his eyesight breaks down. But exactly where 
his eyesight breaks down there presses upon him, 
whether he likes it or not, the perception of the 
unlimited, or infinite. It may be said this is not 
perception, in the ordinary sense of the word. No 
more it is, but still less is it mere reasoning. In 
perceiving the Infinite, we neither count, nor 
measure, nor compare, nor name. We know not 
what it is, but we know that it is, and we know it 



92 LIFE AND RELIGION 

because we actually feel it and are brought in 
contact with it. If it seems too bold to say that 
man actually sees the invisible let us say that he 
suffers from the invisible, and this invisible is only 
a special name for the Infinite. The Infinite, 
therefore, instead of being merely a late abstraction 
is really implied in the earliest manifestations 
of our sensuous knowledge. It was true from the 
very first, but it was not yet defined or named. 
If the Infinite had not from the very first been 
present in our sensuous perceptions, such a word 
as infinite would be a sound and nothing else. 
With very finite perception there is a concomitant 
perception or a concomitant sentiment or present- 
ment of the Infinite; from the very first act of touch, 
or hearing, at sight, we are brought in contact, 
not only with the visible, but also at the same time 
with an invisible universe. We have in this that 
without which no religion would have been possi- 
ble; we have in that perception of the Infinite the 
root of the whole historical development of re- 
ligion. Hibbert Lectures. 



No thought, no name is ever entirely lost. 
When we here in this ancient Abbey,* which was 
built on the ruins of a still more ancient Roman 

* Westminster. 



LIFE AND RELIGION 93 

temple, seek for a name for the invisible, the 
Infinite that surrounds us on every side, the 
unknown, the true Self of the world, and the true 
Self of ourselves — we, too, feeling once more like 
children, kneeling in a small dark room, can hardly 
find a better name than, "Our Father, which art 
in Heaven." Ibid, 



The idea of the Infinite, which is at the root of all 
religious thought, is not simply evolved by reason 
out of nothing, but supplied to us, in its original 
form, by our senses. Beyond, behind, beneath 
and within the Finite, the Infinite is always present 
to our senses. It presses upon us, it grows upon us 
from every side. What we call finite in space and 
time, in form and word, is nothing but a veil or 
a net which we ourselves have thrown over the 
infinite. The Finite by itself, without the Infinite, 
is simply inconceivable; as inconceivable as the 
Infinite without the Finite. As reason deals with 
the finite materials, supplied to us by our senses, 
faith, or whatever else we like to call it, deals 
with the Infinite that underlies the Finite. What 
we call sense, reason, and faith, are three functions 
of one and the same perceptive self; but without 
sense, both reason and faith are impossible, at 
least to human beings like ourselves. Ibid. 



94 LIFE AND RELIGION 

The ancestors of our race did not only believe 
in divine powers more or less manifest to their 
senses, in rivers and mountains, in the sky and the 
sun, in the thunder and rain, but their senses 
likewise suggested to them two of the most essential 
elements of all religion, the concept of the infinite, 
and the concept of law and order, as revealed 
before them, the one in the golden sea behind the 
dawn, the other in the daily path of the sun. . . . 
These two concepts which sooner or later must be 
taken in and minded by every human being, were 
at first no more than an impulse, but their impulsive 
force would not rest till it had beaten into the 
minds of the fathers of our race the deep and 
indelible impression that "all is right," and 
filled them with a hope, and more than a hope, 
that "all will be right." Ibid. 



The real religious instinct or impulse is the 
perception of the Infinite. Ibid. 



All objects which we perceive and afterward 
conceive and name must be circumscribed, must 
have been separated from their surroundings, 
must be measurable, and can thus only become 
perceivable and knowable and nameable. . . . 



LIFE AND RELIGION 95 

They are therefore finite in their very nature. 
. . . If finiteness is a necessary characteristic 
of our ordinary knowledge, it requires but little 
reflection to perceive that limitation or finiteness, 
in whatever sense we use it, always implies a 
something beyond. We are told that our mind is 
so constituted, whether it is our fault or not, that 
we cannot conceive an absolute limit. Beyond 
every limit we must always take it for granted 
that there is something else. But what is the 
reason of this ? The reason why we cannot con- 
ceive an absolute limit is because we never perceive 
an absolute limit; or, in other words, because in 
perceiving the finite, we always perceive the Infinite 
also. . . . There is no limit which has not 
two sides, the one turned toward us, the other 
turned toward what is beyond; and it is that 
Beyond which from the earliest days has formed 
the only real foundation of all that we call tran- 
scendental in our perceptual, as well as in our 
conceptual, knowledge. Gifjord Lectures, I. 



The Infinite was not discovered behind the veil 
of nature only, though its manifestation in physical 
phenomena was no doubt the most primitive and 
the most fertile source of mythological and religious 
ideas. There were two more manifestations of the 



$6 LIFE AND RELIGION 

Infinite and the unknown, which must not be neg- 
lected, if we wish to gain a complete insight into 
the theogonic process through which the human 
mind had to pass from its earliest days. The 
Infinite disclosed itself not only in nature but like- 
wise in man, looked upon as an object, and lastly 
in man looked upon as a subject. Man looked 
upon as an object, as a living thing, was felt to be 
more than a mere part of nature. There was 
something in man, whether it was called breath or 
spirit or soul or mind, which was perceived and 
yet not perceived, which was behind the veil of 
the body, and from a very early time was believed 
to remain free from decay, even when illness and 
death had destroyed the body in which it seemed 
to dwell. There was nothing to force even the 
simplest peasant to believe that because he saw 
his father dead, and his body decaying, therefore 
what was known as the man himself, call it his 
soul or his mind, or his person, had vanished 
altogether out of existence. A philosopher may 
arrive at such an idea, but a man of ordinary 
understanding, though terrified by the aspect of 
death, would rather be inclined to believe that 
what he had known and loved and called his 
father or mother, must be somewhere, though no 
longer in the body. . . . It is perhaps too 
much to say that such a belief was universal; but 



LIFE AND RELIGION 97 

it certainly was and is still very widely spread. 
In fact it constitutes a very large portion of 
religion, and religious worship. Ibid. 



Nature, Man, and Self are the three great 
manifestations in which the Infinite in some shape 
or other has been perceived, and every one of 
these perceptions has in its historical development 
contributed to what may be called religion. 

Ibid. 

Like all other experiences, our religious experi- 
ence begins with the senses. Though the senses 
seem to deliver to us finite experiences only, many 
if not all, of them can be shown to involve some- 
thing beyond the known, something unknown, 
something which I claim the liberty to call infinite. 
In this way the human mind was led to the recogni- 
tion of undefined, infinite agents or agencies 
beyond, behind, and within our finite experience. 
The feelings of fear, awe, reverence, and love 
excited by the manifestations of some of these 
agents or powers began to react on the human 
mind, and thus produced what we call 
Natural Religion in its lowest and simplest 
form — fear, awe, reverence, and love of the 
gods. Ibid. 



98 LIFE AND RELIGION 

The perception of the Infinite can be shown by 
historical evidence to be the one element shared 
in common by all religions. Only we must not 
forget that, like every other concept, that of the 
Infinite also had to pass through many phases in 
its historical evolution, beginning with the simple 
negation of what is finite, and the assertion of an 
invisible Beyond, and leading up to a perceptive 
belief in that most real Infinite in which we live 
and move and have our being. 

Gi fjord Lectures, IV, 



KNOWLEDGE 

The lesson that there are limits to our knowledge 
is an old lesson, but it has to be taught again and 
again. It was taught by Buddha, it was taught 
by Socrates, and it was taught for the last time in 
the most powerful manner by Kant. Philosophy 
has been called the knowledge of our knowledge; 
it might be called more truly the knowledge of our 
ignorance, or, to adopt the more moderate language 
of Kant, the knowledge of the limits of our knowl- 
edge. Last Essays. 



Metaphysical truth is wider than physical truth, 
and the new discoveries of physical observers, if 
they are to be more than merely contingent truths, 
must find their appointed place and natural refuge 
within the immovable limits traced by the 
metaphysician. . . . It is only after having 
mastered the principles of metaphysics that the 
student of nature can begin his work in the right 
spirit, knowing the horizon of human knowledge, 
and guided by principles as unchangeable as the 
pole star. Ibid. 

99 



ioo LIFE AND RELIGION 

There is no subject in the whole realm of human 
knowledge that cannot be rendered clear and in- 
telligible, if we ourselves have perfectly mastered it. 
Chips from a German Workshop. 

The bridge of thoughts and sighs that spans the 
whole history of the Aryan world has its first 
arch in the Veda, its last in Kant's "Critique of 
Pure Reason. " In the Veda we watch the 
first unfolding of the human mind as we can watch 
it nowhere else. Life seems simple, natural, 
childlike. . . . What is beneath, and above, 
and beyond this life is dimly perceived, and 
expressed in a thousand words and ways, all 
mere stammerings, all aiming to express what 
cannot be expressed, yet all full of a belief in the 
real presence of the Divine in Nature, of the 
Infinite in the Finite. . . . While in the 
Veda we may study the childhood, we may study 
in Kant's "Critique" the perfect manhood of the 
Aryan mind. It has passed through many phases, 
and every one of them . . . has left its 
mark. It is no longer dogmatical, no longer 
sceptical, least of all is it positive. ... It 
stands before us conscious of its weakness and its 
strength, modest yet brave. It knows what the 
old idols of its childhood and youth were made of. 
It does not break them, it only tries to understand 



LIFE AND RELIGION 101 

them, but it places above them the Ideals of 
Reason — no longer tangible — not even within the 
reach of the understanding — but real — bright and 
heavenly stars to guide us even in the darkest night. 
Translation of Kant's " Critique of Pure Reason." 



All knowledge, in order to be knowledge, must 
pass through two gates, and two gates only; the 
gate of the senses, and the gate of reason. Relig- 
ious knowledge also, whether true or false, must 
have passed through these two gates. At these 
two gates therefore we take our stand. Whatever 
claims to have entered in by any other gate, 
whether that gate is called primeval revelation or 
religious instinct, must be rejected as contraband 
of thought; and whatever claims to have entered 
by the gate of reason, without having first passed 
through the gate of the senses, must equally be 
rejected, as without sufficient warrant, or ordered 
at least to go back to the first gate, in order to 
produce there its full credentials. 

Hibbert Lectures. 



LANGUAGE 

The history of language opens a vista which 
makes one feel almost giddy if one tries to see the 
end of it, but the measuring rod of the chronologist 
seems to me entirely out of place. Those who 
have eyes to see will see the immeasurable 
distance between the first historical appearance 
of language and the real beginnings of human 
speech; those who cannot see will oscillate 
between the wildly large figures of the 
Buddhists, or the wildly small figures of the 
Rabbis, but they will never lay hold of what by its 
very nature is indefinite. Life. 



By no effort of the understanding, by no stretch 
of imagination, can I explain to myself how lan- 
guage could have grown out of anything which 
animals possess, even if we granted them millions 
of years for that purpose. If anything has a right 
to the name of specific difference, it is language, as 
we find it in man, and in man only. Even if we 
removed the name of specific difference from our 
philosophic dictionaries, I should still hold that 

102 



LIFE AND RELIGION 103 

nothing deserves the name of man except what is 
able to speak. Science of Thought. 



Every language has to be learned, but who made 
the language that was to be learned ? It matters 
little whether we call language an instinct, a gift, a 
talent, a faculty, or the proprium of man; certain 
it is that neither language, nor the power 
of language, nor the conditions under which 
alone language can exist, are to be discovered 
anywhere in the whole animal kingdom, except 
in man. Ibid. 



It was Christianity which first broke down the 
barrier between Jew and Gentile, between Greek 
and Barbarian, between the white and the black. 
Humanity is a word which you look for in vain in 
Plato and Aristotle; the idea of mankind as one 
family, as the children of one God, is an idea of 
Christian growth; and the science of mankind, 
and of the languages of mankind, is a science which, 
without Christianity, would never have sprung 
into life. When people had been taught to look 
upon all men as brethren, then, and then only, did 
the variety of human speech present itself as a 
problem that called for a solution in the eyes of 



io 4 LIFE AND RELIGION 

thoughtful observers; and from an historical point 
of view it is not too much to say that the first day 
of Pentecost marks the real beginning of the science 
of language. Science of Language. 



And now, if we gaze from our native shores over 
the vast ocean of human speech, with its waves 
rolling on from continent to continent, rising under 
the fresh breezes of the morning of history, and 
slowly heaving in our own more sultry atmosphere, 
with sails gliding over its surface, and many an 
oar ploughing through its surf, and the flags of all 
nations waving joyously together, with its rocks 
and wrecks, its storms and battles, yet reflecting 
serenely all that is beneath and above and around 
it; if we gaze and hearken to the strange sounds 
rushing past our ears in unbroken strains, it seems 
no longer a wile tumult, but we feel as if placed 
within some ancient cathedral, listening to a chorus 
of innumerable voices : and the more intensely we 
listen, the more all discords melt away into higher 
harmonies, till at last we hear but one majestic tri- 
chord, or a mighty unison, as at the end of a sacred 
symphony. Such visions will float through the study 
of the grammarian, and in the midst of toilsome 
researches his heart will suddenly beat, as he feels 
the conviction growing upon him that men are 



LIFE AND RELIGION 105 

brethren in the simplest sense of the word — the 
children of the same Father — whatever their coun- 
try, their language, and their faith. 

Bunsens "Philosophy of Universal History," I. 



LIFE 

All really great and honest men may be said to 
live three lives : there is one life which is seen and 
accepted by the world at large, a man's outward 
life; there is a second life which is seen by a man's 
most intimate friends, his household life; and there 
is a third life, seen only by the man himself, and 
by Him who searcheth the heart, which may be 
called the inner or heavenly — a life led in com- 
munion with God, a life of aspiration rather than of 
fulfilment. Chips from a German Workshop. 



Where Plato could only see imperfections, the 
failures of the founders of human speech, we see, 
as everywhere else in human life, a natural prog- 
ress from the imperfect toward the perfect, unceas- 
ing attempts at realising the ideal, and the frequent 
triumphs of the human mind over the inevitable 
difficulties of this earthly condition — difficulties 
not of man's own making, but, as I firmly believe, 
prepared for him, and not without a purpose, as 
toils and tasks, by a higher Power, and by the 
highest Wisdom. Ibid* 

106 



LIFE AND RELIGION 107 

Our life is not completely in our hands — we 
must submit to many things which we may smile 
at in our inmost heart, but which nevertheless are 
essential, not only to our happiness, but to our ful- 
filling the duties which we are called to fulfil. We 
ought to look upon the circumstances in which we 
are born and brought up as ordained by a Higher 
Power, and we must learn to walk the path which 
is pointed out to us! Life, 



It is difficult to be always true to ourselves, to 
be always what we wish to be, what we feel we 
ought to be. As long as we feel that, as long as we 
do not surrender the ideal of our life, all is right. 
Our aspirations represent the true nature of our 
soul much more than our everyday life. I feel as 
much as you, how far I have been left behind in 
the race which I meant to run, but I honestly 
try to rouse myself, and to live up to what 
I feel I ought to be. Let us keep up our 
constant fight against all that is small and 
common and selfish, let us never lose our faith 
in the ideal life, in what we ought to be, and 
in what with constant prayer to God we shall 
be, and let us never forget how unworthy we 
are of all the blessings God has showered down 
upon us. Ibid. 



108 LIFE AND RELIGION 

I feel quite thankful for any little misfortune; 
it is like paying something of the large debt of hap- 
piness we owe, though it is but a very trifling inter- 
est, and the capital we must owe forever. MS. 



I thought a long time about my happiness, and 
my unworthiness, and God's unbounded mercy. 
And then I heard the words within me: "Be not 
afraid." Yes, there must be no fear. Where there 
is fear, there is no perfect love. Our happiness 
here is but a foretaste of our blessed life hereafter. 
We must never forget that. We shall be called 
away, but we shall meet again. MS. 



I begin to be quite thankful for my disappoint- 
ment — we all want winding up, and nothing does 
it so well as a great disappointment, if we only see 
clearly Who sent it and then forget everything else. 

MS. 

One sometimes forgets that all this is only the 
preparation for what is to come hereafter. Yet 
we should never forget this, otherwise this life loses 
its true meaning and purpose. If we only know 
what we live for here, we can easily find out what 
is worth having in this life, and what is not; we 



LIFE AND RELIGION 109 

can easily go on without many things which others, 
whose eyes are fixed on this world only, consider 
essential to their happiness. MS. 



The spirit of love, and the spirit of truth, are 
the two life springs of our whole being — or, what is 
the same, of our whole religion. If we lose that 
bond, which holds us and binds us to a higher 
world, our life becomes purposeless, joyless; if it 
holds us and supports, life becomes perfect, all 
little cares vanish, and we feel we are working out 
a great purpose, as well as we can, a purpose not 
our own, not selfish, not self-seeking, but, in the 
truest sense of the word, God serving and God 
seeking. . . . Gentleness is a kind of mixture 
of love and truthfulness, and it should be the 
highest object of our life to attain more and more 
to that true gentleness which throws such a charm 
over all our life. There is a gentleness of voice, 
of look, of movement, of speech, all of which are 
but the expressions of true gentleness of heart. 

MS. 

It is impossible to take too high a view of life; 
the very highest we take is still too low. One feels 
that more and more as our life draws to its close, 
and many things that seemed important once are 



no LIFE AND RELIGION 

seen to be of no consequence, while only a few 
things remain which will tell forever. MS. 



I don't believe in what is called worldly 
wisdom. I do not think the world was made 
for it — with real faith in a higher life I believe 
one can pass through this life without let or 
hindrance. What I dread are compromises. 
There are false notes in them always, and a 
false note goes on forever. MS. 



How thankful we ought to be every minute of 
our existence to Him who gives us all richly to 
enjoy. How little one has deserved this happy 
life, much less than many poor sufferers to whom 
life is a burden and a hard and bitter trial. But 
then, how much greater the claims on us; how 
much more sacred the duty never to trifle, never to 
waste time and power, never to compromise, but 
to live in all things, small and great, to the praise 
and glory of God, to have God always present with 
us, and to be ready to follow His voice, and His 
voice only. Has our prosperity taught us to meet 
adversity when it comes ? I often tremble, but 
then I commit all to God, and I say, "Have mercy 
upon me, a miserable sinner." Life. 



LIFE AND RELIGION in 

There is something very awful in this life, 
and it is not right to try to forget it. It is 
well to be reminded by the trials of others of 
what may befall us, and what is kept from us 
only by the love of our Father in Heaven, not by 
any merit of our own. MS. 



How different life is to what one thought it when 
young, how all around us falls together, till we 
ourselves fall together. How meaningless and 
vain everything seems on earth, and how closely 
the reality of the life beyond approaches us. Many 
days were beautiful here, but the greater the hap- 
piness the more bitter the thought that it all passes 
away, that nothing remains of earthly happiness, 
but a grateful heart and faith in God who knows 
best what is best for us. MS. 



Oh ! if we could even in this life forget all that is 
unessential, all that makes it so hard for us to recog- 
nise true greatness and goodness in the character 
of those with whom this life brings us in contact 
for a little while! How much we lose by making 
little things so important, and how rarely do we 
think highly enough of what is essential and lasting! 

MS. 



ii2 LIFE AND RELIGION 

You must accustom yourself more and more to 
the thought that here is not our abiding city, that all 
that we call ours here is only lent, not given us, 
and that if the sorrow for those we have lost remains 
the same, we must yet acknowledge with gratitude 
to God the great blessing of having enjoyed so 
many years with those whom He gave us, as 
parents, or children, or friends. One forgets so 
easily the happy years one has had with those who 
were the nearest to us. Even these years of hap- 
piness, however short they may have been, were 
only given us; we had not deserved them. I know 
well there is no comfort for this pain of parting: 
the wound always remains, but one learns to bear 
the pain, and learns to thank God for what He 
gave, for the beautiful memories of the past, and 
the yet more beautiful hope for the future. If a 
man has lent us anything for several years, and at 
last takes it back, he expects gratitude, not anger, 
and if God has more patience with our weakness 
than men have, yet murmurs and complaints for 
the life which He measured out for us as is 
best for us are not what He expected from 
us. A spirit of resignation to God's will is 
our only comfort, the only relief under the trials 
God lays upon us, and with such a spirit the 
heaviest as well as the lightest trials of life 
are not only bearable, but useful, and gratitude 



LIFE AND RELIGION 113 

to God, and joy in life and death remain 
untroubled. Life. 



By a grave one learns what life really is — that it 
is not here but elsewhere — that this is the exile and 
there is our home. As we grow older the train of 
life goes faster and faster, those with whom we 
travelled together step out from station to station, 
and our own station too will soon be marked. 

MS. 

It seems to me so ungrateful to allow one moment 
to pass that is not full of joy and happiness, and 
devotion to Him who gives us all this richly to 
enjoy. The clouds will come, they must come, 
but they ought never to be of our own making. 

Life. 

The shadows fall thicker and thicker, but even 
in the shade it is well, often better than in full sun- 
shine. And when the evening comes, one is tired, 
and ready to sleep! And so all is ordered for us, 
if we only accommodate ourselves to it quietly. 

Ibid. 

As long as God wills it we must learn to bear this 
life, but when He calls us we willingly close our 



ii 4 LIFE AND RELIGION 

eyes, for we know it is better for us there than here. 
When so many whom we loved are gone before us, 
we follow gladly; and the older we become here, 
the more one feels that death is a relief. And yet we 
can thankfully enjoy what is still left us on earth, 
even if our hearts no longer cling to it as formerly. 

Ibid. 

Our life here is not our own work, and we know 
that it is best for us all just as it is. We ought to 
bear it, and we must bear it; and the more patiently, 
yes, the more joyfully, we accommodate ourselves 
to it, the better for us. We must take life as it is, 
as the way appointed for us, and that must lead 
to a certain goal. Some go sooner, some later, 
but we all go the same way, and all find the same 
place of rest. Impatience, gloom, murmurs and 
tears do not help us, do not alter anything and 
make the road longer, not shorter. Quiet, resigna- 
tion, thankfulness and faith help us forward, and 
alone make it possible to perform the duties which 
we all, each in his own sphere, have to fulfil. . . . 
The darker the night, the clearer the stars in 
heaven. Ibid. 



How different life might be, if in our daily 
intercourse and conversation we thought of our 



LIFE AND RELIGION 115 

friends as lying before us on the last bed of flowers 
— how differently we should then judge, and how 
differently we should act. All that is of the earth 
is then forgotten, all the little failings inherent in 
human nature vanish from our minds, and we 
only see what was good, unselfish and loving in 
that soul, and we think with regret of how much 
more we might have done to requite that love. It 
is curious how forgetful we are of death, how little 
we think that we are dying daily, and that what 
we call life is really death, and death the beginning 
of a higher life. Such a thought should not make 
our life less bright, but rather more — it should 
make us feel how unimportant many things are 
which we consider all-important: how much we 
could bear which we think unbearable, if only we 
thought that to-morrow we ourselves or our 
friends may be taken away, at least for a time. 
You should think of death, should feel that what 
you call your own is only lent to you, and that all 
that remains as a real comfort is the good work 
done in this short journey, the true unselfish love 
shewn to those whom God has given us, has 
placed near to us, not without a high purpose. 

Ibid. 

What a marvel life seems to be the older we 
grow! So far from becoming more intelligible, it 



n6 LIFE AND RELIGION 

becomes a greater wonder every day. One 
stands amazed, and everything seems so small — 
the little one can do so very small. One ought 
not to brood too much, when there is no chance of 
light, and yet how natural it is that one should 
brood over life and death, rather than on the little 
things of life. Ibid. 



If we only hold fast the belief that nothing 
happens but by the will of God, we learn to be 
still and can bear everything. The older one 
grows, the more one feels sure that life here is but 
a long imprisonment, and one longs for freedom 
and higher efforts. . . . How small and in- 
significant is all in this life when we rise our eyes 
above. Gazing up to the Lord of the Universe, 
all strife is made easy. We speak different tongues 
when we think of the Highest, but we all mean 
the same thing. MS. 



It is sad to think of all that was and is no more, 
and yet there is something much more real in 
memory than one used to think. All is there but 
what our weak human senses require, and nothing 
is lost, nothing can be lost except what we know 
would vanish one day, but what was the husk only, 



LIFE AND RELIGION 117 

not the kernel. I have learned to live with those 
who went before us, and they seem more entirely 
our own than when they were with us in the body. 
And as long as we have duties to fulfil, so long as 
there are others who lean on us and want us, life 
can be lived a few years longer; it can only be a 
few years. MS. 



Life is earnest! is a very old lesson, and we are 
never too old to learn it. "Life is an art," is 
Goethe's doctrine, and there is some truth in it 
also, as long as art does not imply artful or artificial. 
Huxley used to say the highest end of life is action, 
not knowledge. There I quite differ. First knowl- 
edge, then action, and what a lottery action is ! The 
best intentions often fail, and what is done to-day 
is undone to-morrow. However, we must toil on and 
do what every day brings us, and do it as well as 
we can, and better, if possible, than anybody else. 

Life. 

What can we call ours if God did not vouchsafe 
it to us from day to day ? Yet it is so difficult to 
give oneself up entirely to Him, to trust everything 
to His Love and Wisdom. I thought I could 
say, "Thy Will be done," but I found I could not: 
my own will struggled against His Will. I prayed 



n8 LIFE AND RELIGION 

as we ought not to pray, and yet He heard me. It 
is so difficult not to grow very fond of this life and 
all its happiness, but the more we love it, the more 
we suffer, for we know we must lose it and it must 
all pass away. MS. 



Our idea of life grows larger, and birth and 
death seem but like morning and evening. One 
feels that as it has been so it will be again, and all 
one can do is to try to make the best of every day, 
as it comes and goes. Life. 



The things that annoy us in life are after all 
very trifling things, if we always bear in mind 
for what purpose we are here. And even in the 
heavier trials, one knows, or one should know, that 
all is sent by a higher power, and in the end must be 
for our best interests. It is true we cannot under- 
stand it, but we can understand that God rules in 
the world in the smallest and in the largest events, 
and he who keeps that ever in mind has the peace 
of God, and enjoys his life as long as it lasts. 

Ibid. 

Life may grow more strange and awful every 
day, but the more strange and awful it grows, the 



LIFE AND RELIGION 119 

more it reveals to us its truest meaning and reality, 
and the deepest depth of its divinity. "And God 
saw everything that He had made, and behold, 
it was very good." Ibid. 



Enjoy the precious years God has added to your 
life, with constant gratitude, with quiet and purity of 
soul, looking more to the heavenly than to the earthly; 
that gives true joyfulness of soul, if we every moment 
recollect what is eternal, and never quite lose our- 
selves in the small, or even the large cares of life. 

Ibid. 

If we live on this earth only, if our thoughts are 
hemmed in by the narrow horizon of this life, then 
we lose indeed those whom death takes from us. 
But it is death itself which teaches us that there 
is a Beyond, we are lifted up and see a new world, 
far beyond what we had seen before. In that 
wide world we lead a new and larger life, a life 
which includes those we no longer see on earth, 
but whom we cannot surrender. The old Indian 
philosophers say that no one can find the truth 
whose heart is attached to his wife and children. 
No doubt perfect freedom from all affections would 
make life and death very easy. But may not the 
very love which we feel for those who belong to us, 



120 LIFE AND RELIGION 

even when they are taken from us, bring light to 
our eyes, and make us see the truth that, by that 
very love, we belong to another world, and that 
from that world, however little we can here know 
about it, love will not be excluded. We believe what 
we desire — true — but why do we desire ? Let us be 
ourselves, let us be what we were meant to be on 
earth, and trust to Him who made us what we are. 

MS. 

Yes, every day adds a new thin layer of new 
thoughts, and these layers form the texture of our 
character. The materials come floating toward 
us, but the way in which they settle down depends 
much on the ebb and flow within us. We can do 
much to keep off* foreign elements, and to attach 
and retain those which serve best in building up a 
strong rock. But from time to time a great sorrow 
breaks through all the strata of our soul — all is 
upheaved, shattered, distorted. In nature all that is 
grand dates from such convulsions — why should we 
wish for a new smooth surface, or let our sorrows 
be covered by the flat sediment of everyday life ? 

MS. 

If we feel that this life can only be a link in a 
chain without beginning and without end, in a 
circle which has its beginning and its end every- 



LIFE AND RELIGION 121 

where and nowhere, we learn to bear it, and to 
enjoy it too, in a new sense. What we achieve 
here assumes a new meaning — it will not altogether 
perish, whether for good or for evil. What is 
done in time is done forever — what is done by one 
affects us all. Thus our love too is not lost — 
what is loved in time is loved forever. The 
form changes, but that which changes, which 
undergoes change, remains itself unchanged. We 
seem to love the fleeting forms of life — and yet how 
can we truly love what is so faithless ? No, we 
truly love what is, and was, and will be, hidden 
under the fleeting forms of life, but in itself more 
than those fleeting forms, however fair. We love 
the fair appearance too — how could it be otherwise? 
But we should love them only as belonging to 
what we love — not as being what we love. So it 
is, or, rather, so it ought to be. Yet while we are 
what we are, we love the flower, not the sightless 
grain of seed, and when that flower fades and 
passes away, we mourn for it, and our only comfort 
is that we too fade and pass away. Then we 
follow there, wherever they go. Some flowers 
fade sooner, some later, but none is quite forgotten. 

MS. 

It would be difficult to say at what moment in 
our young lives real responsibility begins. The law 



122 LIFE AND RELIGION 

fixes a time, our own heart cannot do that. Yet 
in spite of this unknown quantity at the beginning, 
we begin afterward to reckon with ourselves. 
Why should we protest against a similar unknown 
quantity before the beginning of our life on earth ? 
Wherever and whenever it was, we feel that we 
have made ourselves what we are. Is not that a 
useful article of faith ? Does it not help us to 
decide on undoing what we have done wrong and 
in doing all the good we can, even if it does not 
bear fruit, within or without, in this life ? A 
break of consciousness does hot seem incompatible 
with a sense of responsibility, if we know by 
reasoning though not by recollection that what we. 
see done in ourselves must have been done by 
ourselves. And even if we waive the question of 
responsibility for the first two or three years of our 
life on earth, surely we existed during those 
years though we do not recollect it — then why not 
before our life on earth ? MS. 



We must learn to live two lives — this short life 
here on earth with its joys and sorrows, and that 
true life beyond, of which this is only a fragment, 
or an interruption. When we enter into that true 
life, we shall find what we cannot find here, we 
shall find what we have lost here. If only so many 



LIFE AND RELIGION 123 

things did not seem so irregular, so unnatural. 
The death of young children before their parents. 
We love them better because we know we can 
lose them — that is true — but yet it is a hard 
lesson to learn. MS. 



One month will go after another, till at last this 
journey is over, and we look back on it grateful 
for the many pleasures it has given us, grateful for 
the company of so many kind friends whom we 
met, grateful also for the struggles which we had 
to go through and which will appear so small, and 
so little worth our tears and anguish, when all is 
over and the last station and resting place reached 
in safety. MS. 



LOVE 

I cannot help thinking that the souls toward 
whom we feel drawn in this life are the very 
souls whom we knew and loved in a former 
life, and that the souls who repel us here, 
we do not know why, are the souls that 
earned our disapproval, the souls from whom 
we kept aloof, in a former life. But let us 
remember that if our love is the love of what 
is merely phenomenal, the love of the body, 
the kindness of the heart, the vigour and 
wisdom of the intellect, our love is the love of 
changing and perishable things. . . . But if 
our love, under all its earthly aspects, was 
the love of the true soul, of what is immortal 
and divine in every man and woman, that 
love cannot die, but will find once more what 
seems beautiful, true and lovable in worlds 
to come, as in worlds that have passed. . . . 
What we truly love in everything is the eternal 
atman, the immortal self, and as we should 
add, the immortal God, for the immortal self 
and the immortal God must be one. 

Last Essays* 
124 



LIFE AND RELIGION 125 

We must not forget that if earthly love has in 
the vulgar mind been often degraded into mere 
animal passion, it still remains in its purest sense 
the highest mystery of our existence, the most 
perfect blessing and delight on earth, and at the 
same time the truest pledge of our more than 
human nature. To be able to feel the same 
unselfish devotion to the Deity which the human 
heart is capable of, if filled with love for another 
human soul, is something that may well be called 
the best religion. Gifford Lectures, IV. 



What the present generation ought to learn, the 
young as well as the old, is spirit and perseverance 
to discover the beautiful, pleasure and joy in 
making it known, and resigning ourselves with 
grateful hearts to its enjoyment; in a word — love, 
in the old, true, eternal meaning of the word. 
Only sweep away the dust of self-conceit, the cob- 
webs of selfishness, the mud of envy, and the old 
type of humanity will soon reappear, as it was 
when it could still "embrace millions." The love 
of mankind, the true fountain of all humanity, is 
still there; it can never be quite choked up. He 
who can descend into this fountain of youth, who 
can again recover himself, who can again be that 
which he was by nature, loves the beautiful 



126 LIFE AND RELIGION 

wherever he finds it; he understands enjoyment 
and enthusiasm, in the few quiet hours which he 
can win for himself in the noisy, deafening hurry 
of the times in which we live. 

Chips from a German Workshop, 

Would not the carrying out of one single com- 
mandment of Christ, " Love one another," change 
the whole aspect of the world, and sweep away 
prisons and workhouses, and envying and strife, 
and all the strongholds of the devil ? Two thou- 
sand years have nearly passed and people have not 
yet understood that one single command of Christ, 
"Love one another"! We are as perfect heathens 
in that one respect as it is possible to be. No, 
this world might be heaven on earth, if we would 
but carry out God's work and God's command- 
ments, and so it will be hereafter. Life. 

If we do a thing because we think it is our duty, 
we generally fail; that is the old law which makes 
slaves of us. The real spirng of our life, and of 
our work in life, must be love — true deep love — 
not love of this or that person, or for this or that 
reason, but deep human love, devotion of soul to 
soul, love of God realised where alone it can be, in 
love of those whom He loves. Everything else is 



LIFE AND RELIGION 127 

weak, passes away; that love alone supports us, 
makes life tolerable, binds the present together with 
the past and future, and is, we may trust, imperish- 
able. Ibid. 



Love which seems so unselfish may become very 
selfish if we are not on our guard. Do not shut 
your eyes to what is dark in others, but do not 
dwell on it except so far as it helps to bring out 
more strongly what is bright in them, lovely and 
unselfish. The true happiness of true love is self 
forgetfulness and trust. Ibid. 



There is nothing in life like a mother's love> 
though children often do not find it out till it is too 
late. If you want to be really happy in life, love 
your mother with all your heart; it is a blessing to 
feel that you belong to her, and that through her 
you are connected by an unbroken chain with the 
highest source of our being. MS. 



Is there such a thing as a lost love ? I do not 
believe it. Nothing that is true and great is ever 
lost on earth, though its fulfilment may be deferred 
beyond this short life. . . . Love is eternal, 



n8 LIFE AND RELIGION 

and all the more so if it does not meet with its ful- 
filment on earth. If once we know that our lives 
are in the hands of God, and that nothing can hap- 
pen to us without His Will, we are thankful for 
the trials which He sends us. Is there anyone 
who loves us more than God ? anyone who knows 
better what is for our real good than God ? This 
little artificial and complicated society of ours may 
sometimes seem to be outside His control, but if we 
think so it is our own fault, and we have to suffer 
for it. We blame our friends, we mistrust our- 
selves, and all this because our wild hearts will not 
be quiet in that narrow cage in which they must 
be kept to prevent mischief. Life. 



Does love pass away (with death) ? I cannot 
believe it. God made us as we are, many, instead 
of one. Christ died for all of us individually, and 
such as we are — beings incomplete in themselves, 
and perfect only through love to God on one side, 
and through love to man on the other. We want 
both kinds of love for our very existence, and 
therefore in a higher and better existence too the 
love of kindred souls may well exist together with 
our love of God. We need not love those we love 
best on earth less in heaven, though we may love 
all better than we do on earth. After all, love seems 



LIFE AND RELIGION 129 

only the taking away those unnatural barriers 
which divide us from our fellow creatures — it is 
only the restoration of that union which binds us 
all together in God, and which has been broken on 
earth we know not how. In Christ alone that 
union was preserved, for He loved us all with a 
love warmer than the love of a husband for his 
wife, or a mother for her child. He gave His life 
for us, and if we ask ourselves there is hardly a 
husband or a mother who would really suffer death 
for his wife or her child. Thus we see that even 
what seems to us the most perfect love is very far 
as yet from the perfection of love which drives out 
the whole self and all that is selfish, and we must 
try to love more, not to love less, and trust that what 
is imperfect here is not meant to be destroyed, but 
to be made perfect hereafter. With God nothing 
is imperfect. We must live and love in God, and 
then we need not fear: though our life seem 
chequered and fleeting, we know that there is a 
home for us in God, and rest for all our troubles 
in Christ. Ibid. 



Let us hold together while life lasts. Hand in 
hand we may achieve more than each alone by him- 
self. We are much less afraid when we are two 
together. The chief condition of all spiritual 



130 LIFE AND RELIGION 

friendship is perfect frankness. There is no bet- 
ter proof of true friendship than sincere reproof, 
where such reproof is necessary. We are occupied 
in one great work, and in this consciousness all 
that is small must necessarily disappear. 

Ibid. 

Why do we love so deeply ? Is not that also 
God's will ? And if so why should that love ever 
cease ? What should we be without it ? I cannot 
believe that we are to surrender that love, that we 
are to lose those who were given us to love. Love 
may be purified, may become more and more 
unselfish, may be very different from what it was 
on earth, but sympathy, suffering together and 
rejoicing together, lies very deep at the root of all 
being — were it ever to cease, our very being might 
cease too. We cannot help loving, loving more 
and more, better and better. Thus life becomes 
brighter and brighter again, and we feel that we 
have not lost those who are taken from us for a 
little while. We love them all the more, all the 
better. MS. 



How selfish we are even in our love. Here we 
live for a short season, and we know we must part 
sooner or later, We wish to go first, and to leave 



LIFE AND RELIGION 131 

those whom we love behind us, and we sorrow 
because they went first and left us behind. As 
soon as one looks beyond this life, it seems so 
short, yet there was a time when it seemed endless. 

MS. 

The past is ours, and there we have all who loved 
us, and whom we love as much as ever, aye, more 
than ever. MS. 



MANKIND 

The earth was unintelligible to the ancients 
because looked upon as a solitary being, without 
a peer in the whole universe; but it assumed a new 
and true significance as soon as it rose before the 
eyes of man as one of many planets, all governed 
by the same laws, and all revolving around the 
same centre. It is the same with the human soul, 
and its nature stands before our mind in quite a 
different light since man has been taught to know 
and feel himself as a member of a great family — as 
one of the myriads of wandering stars all governed 
by the same laws, and all revolving around the 
same centre, and all deriving their light from the 
same source. "Universal History" has laid open 
new avenues of thought, and it has enriched our 
language with a word which never passed the lips 
of Socrates, or Plato, or Aristotle — Mankind. 
Where the Greek saw barbarians we see brethren; 
where the Greek saw nations, we see mankind, 
toiling and suffering, separated by oceans, divided 
by language, and severed by national enmity — 
yet evermore tending, under a Divine control, 
toward the fulfilment of that inscrutable purpose 

132 



LIFE AND RELIGION 133 

for which the world was created, and man placed 
in it, bearing the image of God. History there- 
fore, with its dusty and mouldering pages, is to us 
as sacred a volume as the book of nature. In both 
we read, or we try to read, the reflex of the laws 
and thoughts of a Divine Wisdom. We believe 
that there is nothing irrational in either history or 
nature, and that the human mind is called upon to 
read and to revere in both the manifestations of a 
Divine Power. 

Chips from a German Workshop. 

There are two antagonistic schools — the one 
believing in a descending, the other in an ascending 
development of the human race; the one asserting 
that the history of the human mind begins of neces- 
sity with a state of purity and simplicity which 
gradually gives way to corruption, perversity, and 
savagery; the other maintaining that the first 
human beings could not have been more than one 
step above the animals, and that their whole history 
is one of progress toward higher perfection. With 
regard to the beginnings of religion, the one school 
holds to a primitive suspicion of something that is 
beyond — call it supernatural, transcendental, in- 
finite, or divine. It considers a silent walking 
across this bridge of life, with eyes fixed on high, 
as a more perfect realisation of primitive religion 



i 3 4 LIFE AND RELIGION 

than singing of Vedic hymns, offering of Jewish 
sacrifices, or the most elaborate creeds and articles. 
The other begins with the purely animal and 
passive nature of man, and tries to show how the 
repeated impressions of the world in which he 
lived drove him to fetichism and totemism, what- 
ever these words may mean, to ancestor worship, 
to a worship of nature, of trees and serpents, of 
mountains and rivers, of clouds and meteors, of 
sun and moon and stars, and the vault of heaven, 
and at last to a belief in One who dwells in heaven 
above. Ibid. 



MIND OR THOUGHT 

Wherever we can see clearly, we see that 
what we call mind and thought consist in 
this, that man has the power not only to receive 
presentations like an animal, but to discover 
something general in them. This element he 
can eliminate and fix by vocal signs; and he 
can further classify single presentations under 
the same general concepts, and mark them by 
the same vocal signs. Silesian Horseherd. 



Language and thought go hand in hand; where 
there is as yet no word, there is not yet an idea. 
The thinking capacity of the mind has its source 
in language, lives in language and develops con- 
tinually in language. Ibid. 



All our thoughts, even the apparently most 
abstract, have their natural beginnings in what 
passes daily before our senses. Nihil in fide nisi 
quod ante fuerit in sensu. Man may for a time be 
unheedful of these voices of nature; but they come 

*35 



136 LIFE AND RELIGION 

again and again, day after day, night after 
night, till at last they are heeded. And if 
once heeded, those voices disclose their purport 
more and more clearly, and what seemed at 
first a mere sunrise becomes in the end a 
visible revelation of the infinite, while the 
setting of the sun is transfigured into the first 
vision of immortality. Hibbert Lectures. 



As the evolution of nature can be studied with 
any hope of success in those products only which 
nature has left us, the evolution of mind also can 
be effectually studied in those products only 
which mind itself has left us. These mental 
products in their earliest form are always 
embodied in language, and it is in language, 
therefore, that we must study the problem of 
the origin, and of the successive stages in the 
growth of mind. Science of Thought. 



If language and reason are identical, or two 
names, or two aspects only of the same thing, and 
if we cannot doubt that language had an historical 
beginning and represents the work of man carried 
on through many thousands of years, we cannot 
avoid the conclusion that before those thousands 



LIFE AND RELIGION 137 

of years there was a time when the first stone of 
the great temple of language was laid, and before 
that time man was without language, and therefore 
without reason. Ibid. 



MIRACLES 

If once the human mind has arrived at the con- 
viction that everything must be accounted for, or, 
as it is sometimes expressed, that there is uniform- 
ity, that there is care and order in everything, and 
that an unbroken chain of cause and effect holds 
the whole universe together, then the idea of the 
miraculous arises, and we, weak human creatures, 
call what is not intelligible to us, what is not in 
accordance with law, what seems to break through 
the chain of cause and effect, a miracle. Every 
miracle, therefore, is of our own making, and of 
our own unmaking. Gifford Lectures, III. 



It is due to the psychological necessities of 
human nature, under the inspiring influence of 
religious enthusiasm, that so many of the true signs 
and wonders performed by the founders of religion 
have so often been exaggerated, and, in spite of the 
strongest protests of these founders themselves, 
degraded into mere jugglery. It is true that all 
this does not form an essential element of religion, 
as we now understand religion. Miracles are no 

J38 



LIFE AND RELIGION 139 

longer used as arguments in support of the 
truth of religious doctrines. Miracles have 
often been called helps to faith, but they 
have so often proved stumbling blocks to 
faith, and no one in our days would venture 
to say that the truth as taught by any religion 
must stand or fall by certain prodigious 
events which may or may not have happened, 
which may or may not have been rightly appre- 
hended by the followers of Buddha, Christ, or 
Mohammed. Gifford Lectures, II. 



Our Lord's ascension will have to be understood 
as a sublime idea, materialised in the language of 
children. Is not a real fact that happened in a 
world in which nothing can happen against the 
will of God, better than any miracle ? Why should 
we try to know more than we can know, if only we 
firmly believe that Christ's immortal spirit ascended 
to the Father ? That alone is true immortality, 
divine immortality; not the resuscitation of the 
frail mortal body, but the immortality of the im- 
mortal divine soul. It was this rising of the Spirit, 
and not of the body, without which, as St. Paul 
said, our faith would be vain. It is the Spirit 
that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing. 

Gifford Lectures, III* 



i 4 o LIFE AND RELIGION 

It will be to many of the honest disciples of 
Christ a real day of Damascus when the very 
name of miracle shall be struck out of the dic- 
tionary of Christian theology. The facts remain 
exactly as they are, but the Spirit of truth will give 
them a higher meaning. What is wanted for this 
is not less, but more, faith, for it requires more 
faith to believe in Christ without than with the 
help of miracles. Nothing has produced so much 
distress of mind, so much intellectual dishonesty, 
so much scepticism, so much unbelief, as the 
miraculous element forced into Christianity from 
the earliest days. Nothing has so much impeded 
missionary work as the attempt to persuade 
people first not to believe in their own miracles, 
and then to make a belief in other miracles a 
condition of their becoming Christians. It is 
easy to say, "You are not a Christian if you do 
not believe in Christian miracles. " I hope the 
time will come when we shall be told, "You are 
not a Christian if you cannot believe in Christ 
without the help of miracles." Ibid. 



MUSIC 

Music is the language of the soul, but it defies 
interpretation. It means something, but that 
something belongs not to this world of sense and 
logic, but to another world, quite real, though 
beyond all definition. ... Is there not in 
music, and in music alone of all the arts, something 
that is not entirely of this earth ? . . . Whence 
comes melody ? Surely not from anything that 
we hear with our outward ears and are able to 
imitate, to improve, or to sublimise. 
Here if anywhere we see the golden stairs on which 
angels descend from heaven and whisper sweet 
sounds into the ears of those who have ears to 
hear. Words cannot be so inspired, for words, we 
know, are of the earth, earthy. Melodies are not 
of the earth, and it is truly said: "Heard melodies 
are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter." 

Auld Lang Syne. 



141 



NATURE 

There is nothing so beautiful as being alone 
with nature; one sees how God's will is fulfilled in 
each bud and leaf that blooms and withers, and 
one learns to recognise how deeply rooted in one 
is this thirst for nature. In living with men one 
is only too easily torn from this real home; then 
one's own plans and wishes and fears spring up; 
then we fancy we can perfect something for our- 
selves alone, and think that everything must 
serve for our own ends and enjoyments, until the 
influence of nature in life, or the hand of God, 
arouses us, and warns us that we live and flourish 
not for enjoyment, nor for undisturbed quiet, but 
to bear fruit in another life. Life. 



When one stands amid the grandeur of nature, 
with one's own little murmurings and sufferings, 
and looks deep into this dumb soul, much becomes 
clear to one, and one is astounded at the false 
ideas one has formed of this life. It is but a 
short journey, and on a journey one can do without 
many things which generally seem necessary to us. 

142 



LIFE AND RELIGION 143 

Yes, we can do without even what is dearest to 
our hearts, in this world, if we know that, after 
the journey we shall have to endure, we shall find 
again those who have arrived at the goal quicker 
and more easily than we have done. Now if life 
were looked upon as a journey for refreshment or 
amusement, which it ought not to be, we might 
feel sad if we have to make our way alone, but if 
we treat it as a serious business journey, then we 
know we have hard and unpleasant work before 
us, and enjoy all the more the beautiful resting 
places which God's love has provided for each of 
us in life. Ibid. 



In the early days of the world, the world was too 
full of wonders to require any other miracles. 
The whole world was a miracle and a revelation, 
there was no need for any special disclosure. At 
that time the heavens, the waters, the sun and 
moon, the stars of heaven, the showers and dew, 
the winds of God, fire and heat, winter and sum- 
mer, ice and snow, nights and days, lightnings and 
clouds, the earth, the mountains and hills, the 
green things upon the earth, the wells, and seas 
and floods — all blessed the Lord, praised Him 
and magnified Him forever. Can we imagine a 
more powerful revelation ? Is it for us to say 



144 LIFE AND RELIGION 

that for the children of men to join in praising and 
magnifying Him who revealed Himself in His 
own way in all the magnificence, the wisdom and 
order of nature, is mere paganism, polytheism, 
pantheism, and abominable idolatry ? I have 
heard many blasphemies; I have heard none 
greater than this. Gifford Lectures, II. 



OBSCURITY 

There may be much depth of wisdom in all 
that darkness and vagueness, but I cannot help 
thinking that there is nothing that cannot be made 
clear, and bright, and simple, and that obscurity 
arises in all cases from slovenly thinking and lazy 
writing. MS. 



H5 



OLD AGE 

Sharing the happiness of other people, entering 
into their feelings, living life over once more with 
them and in them, that is all that remains to old 
people. I suppose it was meant to be so, the 
principal object of life being the overcoming of 
self, in every sense of the word. Life. 



This is a lesson one has to learn as one grows 
older, to learn to be alone, and yet to feel one in 
spirit with all whom one loves, whether present or 
absent. MS. 



You cannot escape from old age, whether it 
comes slowly or suddenly, but it comes unawares, 
and you suddenly feel that you cannot walk or 
jump as you used to do, and even the muscles 
of the mind don't hold out as they used. Well, 
so it was meant to be, and it will be pleasant to 
begin again with new muscles, and to take up 
new work. After seeing a good deal of life, I 
still think the greatest satisfaction is work: 

146 



LIFE AND RELIGION 147 

I do not mean drudgery, but one's own 
findings out. Life. 



As one is getting old, and looks forward with 
fear rather than with hope to what is still in 
store for us, one learns to appreciate more and 
more the never failing pleasure of recalling all the 
bright and happy days that are gone. Gone 
they are, but they are not lost. Ever present to 
our calling and recalling, they assume at last a 
vividness such as they hardly had when present, 
and when we poor souls were trembling for every 
day and hour and minute that was going and 
ever going and would not and could not abide. 

ibid. 



RELIGION AND RELIGIONS 

God is not far from each one of those who seek 
God, if haply they may feel after Him. Let 
theologians pile up volume upon volume of what 
they call theology, religion is a very simple matter, 
and that which is so simple and yet so all-important 
to us, the living kernel of religion, can be found, I 
believe, in almost every creed, however much the 
husk may vary. And think what that means! 
It means that above and beneath and behind all 
religions there is one eternal, one universal religion, 
a religion to which every man belongs, or may 
belong. Last Essays. 



True religion, that is, practical, active, living 
religion, has little or nothing to do with logical 
or metaphysical quibbles. Practical religion is 
life, is a new life, a life in the sight of God, and it 
springs from what may truly be called a new birth. 

Ibid. 

Our senses can never perceive a real boundary, 
be it on the largest or the smallest scale; they 

148 



LIFE AND RELIGION 



149 



present to us everywhere the infinite as their 
background, and everything that has to do with 
religion has sprung out of this infinite background 
as its ultimate and deepest foundation. 

Stlesian Horseherd. 

I cannot bring myself to take much interest in 
all the controversies that are going on [1865] in 
the Church of England. . . . No doubt the 
points at issue are great, and appeal to our hearts 
and minds, but the spirit in which they are treated 
seems to me so very small. How few men on 
either side give you the impression that they write 
face to face with God, and not face to face with 
men and the small powers that be. Surely this 
was not so in the early centuries, nor again at the 
time of the Reformation ? Life. 



We live in two worlds: behind the seen is the 
unseen, around the Finite the Infinite, above the 
comprehensible the incomprehensible. There have 
been men who have lived in this world only, who 
seem never to have felt the real presence of the 
unseen: and yet they achieved some greatness as 
rulers of men, as poets, artists, philosophers, and 
discoverers. But the greatest among the great 
have done their greatest works in moments of self- 



150 LIFE AND RELIGION 

forgetful ecstasy, in union and communion with a 
higher world: and when it was done, such was 
their silent rapture that they started back, and 
could not believe it was their own, their very own, 
and they ascribed the glory of it to God, by 
whatever name they called Him in their various 
utterances. And while the greatest among the 
great thus confessed that they were not of this 
world only, and that their best work was but in 
part their own, those whom we reverence as the 
founders of religions, and who were at once 
philosophers, poets, and rulers of men, called 
nothing their own, but professed to teach only 
either what their fathers had taught them, or 
what a far-off Voice had whispered in their ear. 
. . . The ancient religions were not founded 
like temples or palaces, they sprang up like sacred 
graves from the soil of humanity, quickened by 
the rays of celestial light. In India, Greece, 
Italy and Germany not even the names of the 
earliest prophets are preserved. And, if in other 
countries the forms and features of the authors of 
their religious faith and worship are still dimly 
visible amidst the clouds of legend and poetry, 
all of them, Moses as well as Zoroaster, Confucius, 
Buddha and Mohammed, seem to proclaim with 
one voice that their faith was no new faith, 
but the faith of their fathers; that their wisdom 



LIFE AND RELIGION 151 

was not their own wisdom, but, like every good 
and perfect gift, given them from above. What 
should we learn from these prophets who from 
distant countries and bygone ages all bear the 
same witness to the same truth ? We should learn 
that though religions may be founded and fashioned 
into strange shapes by the hand of man, religion is 
one and eternal. From the first dawn that ever 
brightened a human hearth or warmed a human 
heart, one generation has told another that there 
is a world beyond the dawn; and the keynotes of 
all religion — the feeling of the Infinite, the bowing 
down before the incomprehensible, the yearning 
after the unseen — having once been set to vibrate, 
have never been altogether drowned in the strange 
and wild music of religious sects and sciences. 
The greatest prophets of the world have been 
those who at sundry times and in divers manners 
have proclaimed again and again in the simplest 
words the simple creed of the fathers, faith in the 
unseen, reverence for the incomprehensible, awe 
of the Infinite — or, simpler still love of God, and 
oneness with the All-Father. Ibid. 



I have endeavoured to make clear two things, 
which constitute the foundation of all religion: 
first that the world is rational, that it is the resulfe 



iS2 LIFE AND RELIGION 

of thought, and that in this sense only is it 
the creation of a being which possesses reason, 
or is reason itself (the Logos); and secondly 
that mind or thought cannot be the outcome 
of matter, but on the contrary is the prius 
of all things. Silesian Horseherd. 



Religion is not philosophy; but there never has 
been a religion, and there never can be, which is 
not based on philosophy, and does not presuppose 
the philosophical notions of the people. The 
highest aim, toward which all philosophy strives, 
is and will always remain the idea of God, 
and it was this idea which Christianity 
grasped in the Platonic sense, and presented 
to us most clearly in its highest form, in the 
Fourth Gospel. Ibid. 



There has been no entirely new religion since 
the beginning of the world. The elements and 
roots of religion were there, as far back as we can 
trace the history of man; and the history of religion 
shows us throughout a succession of new combina- 
tions of the same radical elements. An intuition 
of God, a sense of human weakness and depend- 
ence, a belief in a Divine government of the 



LIFE AND RELIGION 153 

world, a distinction between good and evil, and a 
hope of a better life, these are some of the radical 
elements of all religions. Though sometimes 
hidden, they rise again and again to the surface. 
Though frequently distorted, they tend again and 
again to their perfect form. Unless they had 
formed part of the original dowry of the human 
soul, religion would have remained an impossibility, 
and the tongues of angels would have been to 
human ears but as sounding brass, or as tinkling 
cymbals. Chips from a German Workshop. 



In lecturing on the origin and growth of religion, 
my chief object has been to show that a belief in 
God, in the immortality of the soul and in a 
future retribution, can be gained, and not only can 
be, but has been gained, by the right exercise of 
human reason alone, without the assistance of 
what has been called a special revelation. In 
doing this, I thought I was simply following in 
the footsteps of the greatest theologians of our 
time, and that I was serving the cause of true 
religion by showing, by ample historical evidence, 
gathered from the Sacred Books of the East, how 
what St. Paul, what the Fathers of the Church, 
what mediaeval theologians, and what some of 
the most learned of modern divines had asserted 



154 LIFE AND RELIGION 

again and again was most strikingly confirmed 
by the records of all non-Christian religions which 
have lately become accessible to us. I could not 
have believed it possible that, in undertaking 
this work, I should have exposed myself to at- 
tacks from theologians who profess and call them- 
selves Christians, and who yet maintain that 
worst of all heresies, that during all the centuries 
that have elapsed and in all the countries of the 
world, God has left Himself without a witness, and 
has revealed Himself to one race only, the Jews 
of Palestine. Gifford Lectures, III, 



If there is one thing which a comparative study 
of religions places in the clearest light, it is the 
inevitable decay to which every religion is exposed. 
It may seem almost like a truism that no religion 
can continue to be what it was during the life- 
time of its founders and its first apostles. Yet it 
is but seldom borne in mind that without constant 
reformation, i. e., without a constant return to its 
fountain head, every religion, even the most 
perfect, on account of its very perfection, more 
even than others — suffers from its contact with 
the world, as the purest air suffers from the mere 
fact of being breathed. 

Chips from a German Workshop, 



LIFE AND RELIGION 155 

To each individual his own religion, if 
he really believes in it, is something quite 
inseparable from himself, something unique, 
that cannot be compared to anything else, 
or replaced by anything else. Our own religion 
is, in that respect, something like our own 
language. In its form it may be like other 
languages; in its essence, and in its relation to 
ourselves, it stands alone and admits of no 
peer or rival. Ibid. 



Three of the results to which, I believe, a com- 
parative study of religion is sure to lead, I may 
here state: 

1. We shall learn that religions, in their most 
ancient form, or in the minds of their authors, 
are generally free from many of the blemishes 
that attach to them in later times. 

2. We shall learn that there is hardly one 
religion which does not contain some truth, some 
important truth; truth sufficient to enable those 
who seek the Lord and feel after Him, to find Him 
in their hour of need. 

3. We shall learn to appreciate better than ever 
what we have in our own religion. No one who 
has not examined patiently and honestly the other 
religions of the world, can know what Christianity 



156 LIFE AND RELIGION 

really is, or can join with such truth and sincerity 
in the words of St. Paul, "I am not ashamed of 
the gospel of Christ." Ibid. 



Many are the advantages to be derived from a 
careful study of other religions, but the greatest 
of all is that it teaches us to appreciate more 
truly what we possess in our own. Let us see 
what other nations have had and still have in the 
place of religion, let us examine the prayers, the 
worship, the theology even of the most highly 
civilised races, and we shall then understand more 
thoroughly what blessings are vouchsafed to us 
in being allowed to breathe from the first breath 
of life the pure air of a land of Christian light and 
knowledge. We are too apt to take the greatest 
blessings as matters of course, and even religion 
forms no exception. We have done so little to 
gain our religion, we have suffered so little in the 
cause of truth, that however highly we prize our 
own Christianity, we never prize it highly enough 
until we have compared it with the religions of the 
rest of the world. Ibid, 



The spirit of truth is the life spring of all re- 
ligion, and where it exists it must manifest itself, 



LIFE AND RELIGION 157 

it must plead, it must persuade, it must convince 
and convert. Ibid. 



As there is a faculty of speech independent of 
all the historical forms of language, there is a 
faculty of faith in man, independent of all histori- 
cal religions. If we say it is religion which dis- 
tinguishes man from the animal, we do not mean 
the Christian and Jewish religion: we do not mean 
any special religion: but we mean a mental faculty 
or disposition, which, independent of, nay, in 
spite of, sense and reason, enables man to appre- 
hend the Infinite under different names, and under 
varying disguises. Without that faculty, no re- 
ligion, not even the lowest worship of idols and 
fetiches, would be possible; and if we will but 
listen attentively, we can hear in all religions a 
groaning of the spirit, a struggle to conceive the 
inconceivable, to utter the unutterable, a longing 
after the Infinite, a love of God. 

Science of Religion. 

Like an old precious metal, the ancient religion, 
after the dust of ages has been removed, will 
come out in all its purity and brightness; and the 
image which it discloses will be the image of the 
Father, the Father of all the nations upon earth; 



158 LIFE AND RELIGION 

and the superscription, where we can read it again, 
will be, not in Judaea only, but in the languages 
of all the races of the world, the Word of God 
revealed where alone it can be revealed — revealed 
in the heart of man. Ibid. 



If we granted that all religions, except Chris- 
tianity and Mosaism, derived their origin from 
those faculties of the mind only which, according 
to Paley, are sufficient by themselves for calling 
into life the fundamental tenets of natural religion, 
the classification of Christianity and Judaism on 
one side as revealed, and of the other religions as 
natural, would still be defective, for the simple 
reason that no religion, though founded on 
revelation, can ever be entirely separated from 
natural religion. The tenets of natural religion, 
though they never constituted by themselves a 
real historical religion, supply the only ground on 
which even revealed religions can stand, the only 
soil where they can strike root, and from which 
they can receive nourishment and life. Ibid. 



The intention of religion, wherever we meet it, 
is always holy. However imperfect, however 
childish a religion may be, it always places the 



LIFE AND RELIGION 159 

human soul in the presence of God : and however 
imperfect and however childish the conception of 
God may be, it always represents the highest ideal 
of perfection which the human soul, for the 
time being, can reach and grasp. Religion there- 
fore places the human soul in the presence of its 
highest ideal, it lifts it above the level of ordinary 
goodness, and produces at last a yearning after a 
higher and better life — a life in the light of God. 

Ibid. 

I suppose that most of us, sooner or later in life, 
have felt how the whole world — this wicked 
world, as we call it — is changed as if by magic, if 
once we can make up our mind to give men credit 
for good motives, never to be suspicious, never to 
think evil, never to think ourselves better than 
our neighbours. Trust a man to be true and 
good, and, even if he is not, your trust will tend 
to make him true and good. It is the same with 
the religions of the world. Let us but once 
make up our minds to look in them for what is 
true and good, and we shall hardly know our old 
religions again. There is no religion — or, if there 
is, I do not know it — which does not say, "Do 
good, avoid evil." There is none which does not 
contain what Rabbi Hillel called the quintessence 
of all religions, the simple warning, " Be good, my 



160 LIFE AND RELIGION 

boy." "Be good, my boy," may seem a very 
short catechism, but let us add to it, "Be good, 
my boy, for God's sake," and we have in it very 
nearly the whole of the Law and the Prophets. 

Ibid. 

In order to choose between different gods, and 
different forms of faith, a man must possess the 
faculty of choosing the instruments of testing 
truth and untruth, whether revealed or not; he 
must know that certain fundamental tenets cannot 
be absent in any true religion and that there are 
doctrines against which his rational or moral 
conscience revolts as incompatible with truth. 
In short, there must be the foundation of religion, 
there must be the solid rock, before it is possible 
to erect an altar, a temple, or a church: and if 
we call that foundation natural religion, it is 
clear that no revealed religion can be thought of 
which does not rest more or less firmly on natural 
religion. Ibid. 



Universal primeval revelation is only another 
name for natural religion, and it rests on no 
authority but the speculations of philosophers. 
The same class of philosophers, considering that 
language was too wonderful an achievement for 



LIFE AND RELIGION 161 

the human mind, insisted on the necessity of 
admitting a universal primeval language, revealed 
directly by God to men, or rather to mute beings; 
while the more thoughtful and more reverent of 
the Fathers of the Church, and among the founders 
of modern philosophy also, pointed out that it 
was more consonant with the general working of 
an all-wise and all-powerful Creator that He 
should have endowed human nature with the 
essential conditions of speech instead of pre- 
senting mute beings with grammers and diction- 
aries ready-made. The same applies to religion. 
A universal primeval religion revealed direct by 
God to man, or rather to a crowd of atheists, may, 
to our human wisdom, seem the best solution of 
all difficulties; but a higher wisdom speaks to us 
out of the realities of history, and teaches us, if 
we will but learn, that "we have all to seek the 
Lord, if haply we may feel after Him, and find 
Him, though He is not far from every one of us." 

Ibid. 

The study of the ancient religions of mankind, 
I feel convinced, if carried on in a bold, but 
scholarlike, careful, and reverent spirit, will 
remove many doubts and difficulties which are due 
entirely to the narrowness of our religious horizon; 
it will enlarge our sympathies, it will raise our 



162 LIFE AND RELIGION 

thoughts above the small controversies of the day, 
and at no distant future evoke in the very heart 
of Christianity a fresh spirit and a new life. 

Ibid. 

No judge, if he had before him the worst of 
criminals, would treat him as most historians and 
theologians have treated the religions of the world. 
Every act in the lives of their founders which 
shows that they were but men, is eagerly seized 
and judged without mercy; every doctrine that is 
not carefully guarded is interpreted in the worst 
sense that it will bear; every act of worship that 
differs from our own way of serving God is held 
up to ridicule and contempt. And this is not 
done by accident but with a purpose, nay, with 
something of that artificial sense of duty which 
stimulates the counsel for the defence to see nothing 
but an angel in his own client, and anything but 
an angel in the plaintiff on the other side. The 
result has been — as it could not be otherwise — a 
complete miscarriage of justice, an utter misap- 
prehension of the real character and purpose of 
the ancient religions of mankind; and, as a 
necessary consequence, a failure in discovering the 
peculiar features which really distinguish Chris- 
tianity from all the religions of the world, and 
secure to its founder His own peculiar place in the 



LIFE AND RELIGION 163 

history of the world, far away from Zoroaster and 
Buddha, from Moses and Mohammed, from 
Confucius and Laotse. By unduly depreciating 
all other religions, we have placed our own in a 
position which its founder never intended for it; 
we have torn it away from the sacred context of 
the history of the world; we have ignored, or 
wilfully narrowed, the sundry times and divers 
manners in which, in times past, God spake unto 
the fathers by the prophets; and instead of 
recognising Christianity as coming in the fulness 
of time, and as the fulfilment of the hopes and 
desires of the whole world, we have brought 
ourselves to look upon its advent as the only 
broken link in that unbroken chain which is 
rightly called the Divine government of the 
world. Nay, worse than this, there are people 
who, from mere ignorance of the ancient religions 
of mankind, have adopted a doctrine more un- 
christian than any that could be found in the 
pages of the religious books of antiquity, i.e. that 
all the nations of the earth, before the rise of 
Christianity, were mere outcasts, forsaken and 
forgotten of their Father in Heaven, without a 
knowledge of God, without a hope of Heaven. 
If a comparative study of the religions of the 
world produced but this one result, that it drove 
this godless heresy out of every Christian heart, 



164 LIFE AND RELIGION 

and made us see again in the whole history of the 
world the eternal wisdom and love of God toward 
all His creatures, it would have done a good work. 

Ibid. 

Do you still wonder at polytheism or at myth- 
ology ? Why, they are inevitable. They are, if 
you like, a parler enfantin of religion. But the 
world has its childhood, and when it was a child, 
it spoke as a child, it understood as a child, it 
thought as a child, and in that it spoke as a child its 
language was true. The fault rests with us, if 
we insist on taking the language of children for 
the language of men, if we attempt to translate 
literally ancient into modern language, oriental 
into occidental speech, poetry into prose. 

Ibid. 

Religion is inevitable if only we are left in 
possession of our senses, such as we really find 
them, not such as they have been defined for us. 
We claim no special faculty, no special revelation. 
The only faculty we claim is perception, the only 
revelation we claim is history, or as it is now 
called, historical evolution. But let it not be 
supposed that we find the idea of the Infinite 
ready made in the human mind from the very 
beginning of our history. All we maintain is that 



LIFE AND RELIGION 165 

the germ or the possibility, the Not-yet of that 
idea, lies hidden in the earliest sensuous percep- 
tions, and that as reason is evolved from what is 
finite, so faith is evolved from what from the 
very beginning is infinite in the perceptions of our 
senses. Hibbert Lectures. 



Each religion has its own peculiar growth, but 
the seed from which they spring is everywhere the 
same. That seed is the perception of the Infinite, 
from which no one can escape who does not wilfully 
shut his eyes. From the first flutter of human con- 
sciousness, that perception underlies all the other 
perceptions of our senses, all our imaginings, all 
our concepts, and every argument of our reason. 
It may be buried for a time beneath the fragments 
of our finite knowledge, but it is always there, and, 
if we dig deep enough, we shall always find that 
buried seed, supplying the living sap to the fibres 
and feeders of all true faith. Ibid. 



Instead of approaching the religions of the world 
with the preconceived idea that they are either 
corruptions of the Jewish religion, or descended, 
in common with the Jewish religion, from some 
perfect primeval revelation, the students of the 



166 LIFE AND RELIGION 

science of religion have seen that it is their duty 
first to collect all the evidence of the early history 
of religious thought that is still accessible in the 
sacred books of the world, or in the mythology, 
customs, or even in the languages of various races. 
Afterward they have undertaken a genealogical 
classification of all the materials that have hitherto 
been collected, and they have then only approached 
the question of the origin of religion in a new spirit, 
by trying to find out how the roots of the various 
religions, the radical concepts which form their 
foundation, and before all, the concept of the 
Infinite, could have been developed, taking for 
granted nothing but sensuous perception on one 
side and the world by which we are surrounded 
on the other. Ibid. 



A distinction has been made for us between 
religion and philosophy, and, so far as form and 
object are concerned, I do not deny that such a dis- 
tinction may be useful. But when we look to the 
subjects with which religion is concerned, they are, 
and always have been, the very subjects on which 
philosophy has dwelt, nay, from which philosophy 
has sprung. If religion depends for its very life 
on the sentiment or the perception of the Infinite 
within the Finite and beyond the Finite, who is to 



LIFE AND RELIGION 167 

determine the legitimacy of that sentiment, or of 
that perception, if not the philosopher ? Who is 
to determine the powers which man possesses for 
apprehending the Finite by his senses, for working 
up his single, and therefore finite, impressions into 
concepts by his reason, if not the philosopher ? 
And who, if not the philosopher, is to find out 
whether man can claim the right of asserting the 
existence of the Infinite, in spite of the constant 
opposition of sense and reason, taking these words 
in their usual meaning ? We should damnify 
religion if we separated it from philosophy: we 
should ruin philosophy if we divorced it from 
religion. Ibid. 



Who, if he is honest toward himself, could say 
that the religion of his manhood was the same as 
that of his childhood, or the religion of his old age 
the same as the religion of his manhood ? It is 
easy to deceive ourselves, and to say that the most 
perfect faith is a childlike faith. Nothing can be 
truer, and the older we grow the more we learn to 
understand the wisdom of a childlike faith. But 
before we can learn that, we have first to learn 
another lesson, namely, to put away childish things. 
There is the same glow about the setting sun as 
there is about the rising sun; but there lies between 



168 LIFE AND RELIGION 

the two a whole world, a journey through the whole 
sky, and over the whole earth. Ibid. 



I hope the time will come when the subterranean 
area of human religion will be rendered more and 
more accessible . . . and that the Science of 
Religion, which at present is but a desire and a 
seed, will in time become a fulfilment, a plenteous 
harvest. When that time of harvest has come, 
when the deepest foundations of all the religions 
of the world have been laid free and restored, who 
knows but that those very foundations may serve 
once more, like the catacombs, or like the crypts 
beneath our old cathedrals, as a place of refuge for 
those who, to whatever creed they may belong, 
long for something better, purer, older, and truer 
than what they can find in the statutable sacrifices, 
services and sermons of the days in which their 
lot on earth has been cast; some who have learnt 
to put away childish things, call them genealogies, 
legends, miracles, or oracles, but who cannot part 
with the childlike faith of their heart. Each 
believer may bring down with him into that quiet 
crypt what he values most, his own pearl of great 
price — the Hindu his innate disbelief in this world, 
his unhesitating belief in another world — the 
Buddhist his perception of an eternal law, his sub- 



LIFE AND RELIGION 169 

mission to it, his gentleness, his pity — the Mahom- 
medan, if nothing else, his sobriety — the Jew his 
clinging, through good and evil days, to the one 
God, who loveth righteousness and whose name is 
"I am" — the Christian that which is better than 
all, if those who doubt it would only try it, our love 
of God, call Him what you like, the Infinite, the 
Invisible, the Immortal, the Father, the highest 
Self, above all, and through all, and in all, mani- 
fested in our love of man, our love of the living, 
our love of the dead, our living and undying love. 

Ibid. 

If we see the same doctrines, sometimes uttered 
even in the very same words, by the Apostles, and 
by what people call the false prophets of the 
heathen world, we need not grudge them these 
precious pearls. When two religions say the same 
thing, it is not always the same thing, but even if it 
is, should we not rather rejoice and try with all our 
might to add to what may be called the heavenly 
dowry of the human race, the common stock of 
truth which, as we are told, is not far from every 
one of us, if only we feel after it and find it. 

Gifford Lectures, I. 

Religion, when looked upon not as supernatural, 
but as thoroughly natural to man, has assumed a 



170 LIFE AND RELIGION 

new meaning and a higher dignity when 
studied as an integral part of that historical 
evolution which has made man what he is, 
and what from the very first he was meant 
to be. Is it no comfort to know that at no 
time and in no part of the world, has God 
left Himself without witness, that the hand 
of God was nowhere beyond the reach of 
the outstretched hands of babes and sucklings; 
nay, that it was from those rude utterances out of 
the mouths of babes and sucklings, that is, of 
savages and barbarians, that has been perfected 
in time the true praise of God ? To have looked 
for growth and evolution in history as well 
as in nature is no blame, and has proved 
no loss to the present or to the last century; 
and if the veil has as yet been but little 
withdrawn from the Holy of Holies, those who 
come after us will have learnt at least this 
one lesson, that this lifting of the veil which 
was supposed to be the privilege of priests, 
is no longer considered as a sacrilege, if attempted 
by any honest seekers after truth. Ibid. 



Religion consists in the perception of the Infinite 
under such manifestations as are able to influence 
the moral character of man. Ibid. 



LIFE AND RELIGION 171 

No opinion is true simply because it has been 
held either by the greatest intellects or by the 
largest number of human beings at different periods 
in the history of the world. No one can spend 
years in the study of the religions of the world, 
beginning with the lowest and ending with the 
highest forms, no one can watch the sincerity of 
religious endeavour, the warmth of religious feeling, 
the nobleness of religious conduct, among races 
whom we are inclined to call pagan or savage, 
without learning at all events a lesson of humility. 
Anybody, be he Jew, Christian, Mohammedan, or 
Brahmin, if he has a spark of modesty left, must 
feel that it would be nothing short of a miracle that 
his own religion alone should be perfect throughout, 
while that of every other believer should be false 
or wrong from beginning to end. Ibid. 



The more we study the history of the religions of 
the world, the clearer it becomes that there is really 
no religion which could be called an individual 
religion, in the sense of a religion created, as it 
were de novo, or rather ab ovo, by one single person. 
This may seem strange, and yet it is really most 
natural. Religion, like language, is everywhere 
an historical growth, and to invent a completely 
new religion would be as hopeless a task as to 



172 LIFE AND RELIGION 

invent a completely new language. Nor do the 
founders of the great historical religions of the 
world ever claim this exclusive authorship. On 
the contrary, most of them disclaim in the strongest 
terms the idea that they have come either to destroy 
or to build a completely new temple. Ibid. 



The whole world in its wonderful history has 
passed through the struggle for life, the struggle 
for eternal life; and every one of us, in his own not 
less wonderful history, has had to pass through the 
same wonderful struggle: for, without it, no re- 
ligion, whatever its sacred books may be, will find 
in the human heart that soil in which alone it can 
strike root and on which alone it can grow and bear 
fruit. We must all have our own bookless religion, 
if the Sacred Books, whatever they may be, are to 
find a safe and solid foundation within ourselves. 
No temple can stand without that foundation, and 
it is because that foundation is so often neglected 
that the walls of the temple become unsafe and 
threaten to fall. Ibid. 



The heart and mind and soul of man are the 
same under every sky, in all the varying circum- 
stances of human life; and it would be awful to 



LIFE AND RELIGION 173 

believe that any human beings should have been 
deprived of that light "which lighteth every man 
that cometh into the world." It is that light which 
lighteth every man, and which has lighted all the 
religions of the world, call them bookless or 
literate, human or divine, natural or supernatural, 
which alone can dispel the darkness of doubt and 
fear that has come over the world. What our age 
wants more than anything else is Natural Religion. 
Whatever meaning different theologians may at- 
tach to Supernatural Religion, history teaches us 
that nothing is so natural as the supernatural. But 
the supernatural must always be superimposed on 
the natural. Supernatural religion without natural 
religion is a house built on sand, and when, as in 
our days, the rain of doubt descends, and the floods 
of criticism come, and the winds of unbelief and de- 
spair blow, and beat upon that house, that house will 
fall because it was not founded on the rock of book- 
less religion, of natural religion, of eternal religion. 

Ibid. 

Every religion, being the property of the young 
and the old, the wise and the foolish, must always 
be a kind of compromise, and, while protesting 
against real corruptions and degradations, we 
must learn to bear with those whose language 
differs from our own, and trust that in spite of the 



i 7 4 LIFE AND RELIGION 

tares which have sprung up during the night, some 
grains of wheat will ripen toward the harvest in 
every honest heart. Gifford Lectures, II. 



In all the fundamentals of religion we are neither 
better nor worse than our neighbours, neither more 
wise nor more unwise than all the members of that 
great family who have been taught to know them- 
selves as children of one and the same Father in 
Heaven. Ibid. 



What can a study of Natural Religion teach us ? 
Why, it teaches us that religion is natural, is real, 
is inevitable, is universal. Is that nothing ? Is it 
nothing to know that there is a solid rock on which 
all religion, call it natural or supernatural, is 
founded ? Is it nothing to learn from the annals of 
history that God has not left Himself without wit- 
ness in that He did good, and gave us rain from 
heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts, and 
the hearts of the whole human race, with food and 
gladness?" Ibid. 



While on the one side a study of Natural Religion 
teaches us that much of what we are inclined to 



LIFE AND RELIGION 175 

class as natural, to accept as a matter of course, is 
in reality full of meaning, is full of God, is in fact 
truly miraculous, it also opens our eyes to another 
fact, namely that many things we are inclined 
to class as supernatural are in reality perfectly 
natural, perfectly intelligible, nay, inevitable, in 
the growth of every religion. Ibid. 



The real coincidences between all the religions 
of the world teach us that all religions spring from 
the same soil — the human heart — that they all look 
to the same ideals, and that they are all surrounded 
by the same dangers and difficulties. Much that 
is represented to us as supernatural in the annals 
of the ancient religions of the world becomes per- 
fectly natural from this point of view. Ibid. 



To those who see no difficulties in their own 
religion, the study of other religions will create no 
new difficulties. It will only help them to appreciate 
more fully what they already possess. For with all 
that I have said in order to show that other religions 
also contain all that is necessary for salvation, it 
would be simply dishonest on my part were I to 
hide my conviction that the religion taught by 
Christ, free as yet from all ecclesiastical fences and 



176 LIFE AND RELIGION 

intrenchments, is the best, the purest, the truest 
religion the world has ever seen. Ibid. 



To expect that religion could ever be placed 
again beyond the reach of scientific treatment or 
honest criticism, shows an utter misapprehension 
of the signs of the times, and would, after all, be 
no more than to set up private judgment against 
private judgment. If the inalienable rights of 
private judgment, that is, of honesty and truth, 
were more generally recognised, the character of 
religious controversy would at once be changed. 
It is restriction that provokes resentment, and 
thus embitters all discussions on religious 
subjects. Gi fjord Lectures, II L 



So far from being dishonest, the distinction 
between a higher and a lower form of religion is 
in truth the only honest recognition of the real- 
ities of life. If to a philosophic mind religion is 
a spiritual love of God and the joy of his full 
consciousness of the spirit of God within him, 
what meaning can such words convey to the 
millions of human beings who nevertheless want 
a religion, a positive, authoritative, or revealed 
religion, to teach them that there is a God, and 



LIFE AND RELIGION 177 

that His commands must be obeyed without ques- 
tioning ? Ibid. 



People ask what can be gained by a compre- 
hensive study of religions, by showing that, as 
yet, no race has been discovered without some 
word for what is not visible, not finite, not human, 
for something superhuman and divine. Some 
theologians go even so far as to resent the dis- 
covery of the universality of such a belief. They 
are anxious to prove that human reason alone 
could never have arrived at a conception of God. 
They would much rather believe that God has 
left Himself without witness than that a belief 
in something higher than the Finite could spring 
up in the human heart from gratitude to Him 
who gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, 
filling our hearts with food and gladness. Ibid. 



Physical religion, beginning in a belief in agents 
behind the great phenomena of nature, reached 
its highest point when it had led the human mind 
to a belief in one Supreme Agent or God, what- 
ever His name might be. It was supposed that 
this God could be implored by prayers and pleased 
by sacrifices. He was called the Father of gods 



178 LIFE AND RELIGION 

and men. Yet even in His highest conception 
He was no more than what Cardinal Newman 
defined God to be. "I mean by the Supreme 
Being," he wrote, "one who is simply self-depend- 
ent, and the only being who is such. I mean that 
He created all things out of nothing, and could 
destroy them as easily as He made them, and that, 
in consequence, He is separated from them by an 
abyss, and incommunicable in all His attributes." 
This abyss separating God from man remains at 
the end of Physical Religion. It constitutes its 
inherent weakness. But this very weakness be- 
comes in time a source of strength, for from it 
sprang a yearning for better things. Even the 
God of the Jews, in His unapproachable majesty, 
though He might be revered and loved by man 
during his life on earth, could receive as it were 
a temporary allegiance only, for "the dead cannot 
praise God, neither any that go down into dark- 
ness!" God was immortal, a man was mortal; 
and Physical Religion could not throw a bridge 
over the abyss that separated the two. Real 
religion, however, requires more than a belief in 
God; it requires a belief in man also, and an 
intimate relation between God and man, at all 
events in a life to come. There is in man an 
irrepressible desire for continued existence. It 
shows itself in life in what we may call self defence. 



LIFE AND RELIGION 179 

It shows itself at the end of life and at the approach 
of death, in the hope of immortality. Ibid. 



So long as we look on the history of the human 
race as something that might or might not have 
been, we cannot wonder that the student of 
religion should prefer to form his opinions of the 
nature of religion and the laws of its growth from 
the masterpiece of Thomas Aquinas, the "Summa 
Sacra Theologian," rather than from the "Sacred 
Books of the East." But when we have 
learned to recognise in history the realisation 
of a rational purpose, when we have learnt 
to look upon it as in the truest sense of the 
word a Divine Drama, the plot revealed in 
it ought to assume in the eyes of a philosopher 
also a meaning and a value far beyond the 
speculations of even the most enlightened and 
logical theologians. Gifjord Lectures, IV. 



The question is whether there is, or whether 
there is not, hidden in every one of the sacred 
books, something that could lift up the human 
heart from this earth to a higher world, some- 
thing that could make man feel the omnipresence 
of a higher Power, something that could make 



180 LIFE AND RELIGION 

him shrink from evil and incline to good, 
something to sustain him in the short jour- 
ney through life, with its bright moments 
of happiness, and its long hours of terrible 
distress. Preface to Sacred Books of the East. 



It has been truly said, and most emphatically, 
by Doctor Newman, that neither a belief in God 
by itself, nor a belief in the soul by itself, would 
constitute religion, and that real religion is founded 
on a true perception of the relation of the soul to 
God, and of God to the soul. 

Gifford Lectures, IV. 

It may be truly said that the founders of the 
religions of the world have all been bridge builders. 
As soon as the existence of a beyond, of a Heaven 
above the earth, of Powers above us and beneath 
us, had been recognised, a great gulf seemed to 
be fixed between what was called by various 
names, the earthly and the heavenly, the material 
and the spiritual, the phenomenal and noumenal, 
or best of all, the visible and invisible world, and it 
was the chief object of religion to unite these two 
worlds again, whether by the arches of hope and 
fear, or by the iron chains of logical syllogisms. 

Ibid. 



LIFE AND RELIGION 181 

Religion, in order to be real religion, a 
man's own religion, must be searched for, 
must be discovered, must be conquered. 
If it is simply inherited, or accepted as 
a matter of course, it often happens that 
in later years it falls away, and has either 
to be reconquered, or to be replaced by another 
religion. Autobiography. 



Religion is growth, never finished. From the 
lowest to the highest stages it is growth, not willed 
only, nor given only, but both. The lowest stages 
may seem very imperfect to us, but they are all 
the more important. Language and mythology 
show us the old path on which man travelled from 
Nature to God. MS. 



There is no lesson which at the present time 
seems more important than to learn that in every 
religion there are precious grains: that we must 
draw in every religion a broad distinction between 
what is essential and what is not, between the 
eternal and the temporary, between the divine 
and the human, and that though the non- 
essential may fill many volumes, the essential 
can often be comprehended in a few words, 



182 LIFE AND RELIGION 

but words on which "hang all the law and the 
prophets." 

Preface to Sacred Books of the East. 



Religions were meant to be many like languages. 
To us one language for the whole human race 
would seem to be far better; but it was not to be. 
Each language was to be a school for each race, 
a talent committed to each nation. And so it is 
with religion. There is truth in all of them, the 
whole truth in none. Let each one cherish his 
own, purify his own, and throw away what is 
dead and decaying. But to give up one's religion 
is like giving up one's life. Even the lowest sav- 
age must keep his own old faith in God, when he 
becomes converted to Christianity, or he will have 
lost the living and life-giving root of his faith. If 
people would only learn to look for what is good 
in all religions, how far more beautiful the world 
would appear in their eyes. They dig hard enough 
to get the ore from out a mine, they sift it, smelt 
it, purify it, and then keep the small pieces of 
gold they have got with all this trouble, forgetting 
the scorice and all the refuse. That is what we 
must do as students of religion — but we do the 
very contrary, we hug the scorice and shut our 
eyes to the glittering rays of gold. Jews and 



LIFE AND RELIGION 183 

Christians are worse in that respect than all other 
people. It may be because their religions are 
freer from human impurities than all other re- 
ligions. But why should that make them blind 
to what is really good in other religions; why 
should it blind them so much that they look upon 
other religions as the work of the Devil ? The 
power of evil has had its work in all religions, 
our own not excepted — but the power of goodness 
prevails everywhere. Till we know that, life and 
history seem intolerable. It would not put an 
end to missionary labour; it would only make it 
more a labour of love, less painful to those whom 
we wish to win, not away from their God, but 
back to their God, Him whom they ignorantly 
worship, and whom we should declare unto them 
— according to our own light, such as it is, less 
dark than theirs on many points, but yet dark, 
as those know best who, like St. Paul, have striven 
hardest to look through the glass of our own weak 
human mind. MS. 



If people would only learn to see that there is 
really a religion beyond all religions, that each 
man must have his own religion which he has 
conquered for himself, and that we must learn to 
tolerate religion wherever we find it. Christianity 



i8 4 LIFE AND RELIGION 

would be a perfect religion, if it did not go beyond 
the simple words of Christ, and if, even in these 
words, we made full allowance for the time and 
place and circumstances in which they were 
spoken, that is, if we simply followed Christ where 
He wishes us to follow Him. We have gone far 
beyond those times and circumstances in many 
things, but in what is most essential we are still 
far behind the teaching of Christ. How many 
call themselves Christians who have no idea how 
difficult it is to be a Christian, a follower of Christ. 
It is easy enough to repeat creeds, and to work 
ourselves into a frame of mind when miracles 
seem most easy. MS. 



It was the duty of the Apostles and of the early 
Christians in general to stand forth in the name 
of the only true God, and to prove to the world 
that their God had nothing in common with the 
idols worshipped at Athens and Ephesus. It was 
the duty of the early converts to forswear all 
allegiance to their former deities, and if they 
could not at once bring themselves to believe that 
the gods whom they had worshipped had no 
existence at all, they were naturally led on to 
ascribe to them a kind of demoniacal nature, and 
to curse them as the offspring of that new prin- 



LIFE AND RELIGION 185 

ciple of Evil with which they had become ac- 
quainted in the doctrines of the early Church. 
. . . Through the whole of St. Augustine's 
works, and through all the works of earlier Chris- 
tian divines, there runs the same spirit of hostility 
blinding them to all that may be good, and true, 
and sacred, and magnifying all that is bad, false, 
and corrupt, in the ancient religions of mankind. 
Only the Apostles and their immediate disciples 
venture to speak in a different, and, no doubt, 
in a more truly Christian spirit, of the old forms 
of worship. . . . What can be more con- 
vincing, more powerful, than the language of 
St. Paul at Athens ? Science of Language. 



Those who believe that there is a God, and 
that He created heaven and earth, and that He 
ruleth the world by His unceasing providence, 
cannot believe that millions of human beings, all 
created like ourselves in the image of God, were, 
in their time of ignorance, so utterly abandoned 
that their whole religion was falsehood, their 
whole worship a farce, their whole life a mockery. 
An honest and independent study of the religions 
of the world will teach us that it was not so . . . 
that there is no religion which does not contain 
some grains of truth. Nay, it will teach us more; 



186 LIFE AND RELIGION 

it will teach us to see in the history of the ancient 
religions, more clearly than anywhere else, the 
Divine education of the human race. Ibid. 



The Divine, if it is to reveal itself at all to us, 
will best reveal itself in our own human form. 
However far the human may be from the Divine, 
nothing on earth is nearer to God than man, 
nothing on earth more godlike than man. And 
as man grows from childhood to old age, the idea 
of the Divine must grow with us from the cradle 
to the grave, from grace to grace. A religion 
which is not able thus to grow and live with us 
as we grow and live is dead already. Definite 
and unvarying uniformity, so far from being a 
sign of honesty and life, is always a sign of dis- 
honesty and death. Every religion, if it is to be 
a bond between the wise and the foolish, the old 
and the young, must be pliant, must be high and 
deep and broad; bearing all things, believing all 
things, hoping all things, enduring all things. 
The more it is so the greater its vitality, the 
greater the strength and warmth of its embrace. 

Hibbert Lectures. 



REVELATION 

True inspiration is, and always has been, the 
spirit of truth within, and this is but another 
name for the spirit of God. It is truth that makes 
inspiration, not inspiration that makes truth. 
Whoever knows what truth is knows also what 
inspiration is: not only tbeopneustos, blown into 
the soul by God, but the very voice of God, the 
real presence of God, the only presence in which 
we, as human beings, can ever perceive Him. 

Autobiography. 

There is nothing in the idea of revelation that 
excludes progress, for whatever definition of rev- 
elation we may adopt, it always represents a com- 
munication between the Divine on one side and 
the Human on the other. Let us grant that the 
Divine element in revelation, that is, whatever of 
truth there is in revelation, is immutable, yet the 
human element, the recipient, must always be 
liable to the accidents and infirmities of human 
nature. That human element can never be elim- 
inated in any religion. . . . To ignore that 
human element in all religions is like ignoring 

i8 7 



188 < LIFE AND RELIGION 

the eye as the recipient and determinant of the 
colours of light. We know more of the sun than 
our forefathers, though the same sun shone on 
them that shines on us; and if astronomy has 
benefited by its telescopes . . . theology also 
ought not to despise whatever can strengthen the 
farsightedness of human reason in its endeavour 
to gain a truer and purer idea of the Divine. A 
veil will always remain. But as in every other 
pursuit, so in religion also, we want less and less 
of darkness, more and more of light; we want, 
call it life, or growth, or development, or progress; 
we do not want mere rest, mere stagnation, mere 
death. Gifford Lectures, I. 



It was the sense of an overpowering truth which 
led to the admission of a revelation. But while 
in the beginning truth made revelation, it soon 
came to pass that revelation was supposed to 
make truth. When we see this happening in every 
part of the world, when we can watch the psycho- 
logical progress which leads in the most natural 
way to a belief in supernatural inspiration, it will 
hardly be said that an historical study of religion 
may be useful to the antiquarian, but cannot help 
Us to solve the burning questions of the day. 

Ibid. 



LIFE AND RELIGION 189 

I believe in one revelation only — the revelation 
within us, which is much better than any revela- 
tions which come from without. Why should 
we look for God and listen for His voice outside 
us only, and not within us ? Where is the temple 
of God, or the true kingdom of God ? Life. 



There are Christian mystics who would not 
place internal revelation, or the voice of God 
within the heart, so far below external revelation. 
To those who know the presence of God within 
the heart, this revelation is far more real than 
any other can be. They hold with St. Paul that 
man is in the full sense of the word the temple 
of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth within 
him; nay, they go even further, and both as 
Christians and as mystics they cling to the belief 
that all men are one in the Father and the Son, as 
the Father is in the Son, and the Son in the Father. 
There is no conflict in their minds between 
Christian doctrine and mystic doctrine. They 
are one and the same in character, the one im- 
parted through Christ on earth, the other imparted 
through the indwelling spirit of God, which again 
is Christ, as born within us. The Gospel of St. 
John is full of passages to which the Christian 
mystic clings, and by which he justifies his belief 



1 9 o LIFE AND RELIGION 

in the indwelling spirit of God, or as he also calls 
it, the birth of Christ in the human soul. 

Gifjord Lectures, II. 

I cannot connect any meaning with a primeval 
revelation, or with an original knowledge of God. 
A knowledge of God is surely at all times impossi- 
ble; man can only trust, he cannot know. He 
can feel the Infinite, and the Divine, he can never 
class it or subdue it by knowledge. The question 
seems to me, how our unconscious relation to God, 
which must be there and can never be destroyed, 
becomes gradually more and more conscious, and 
that is what one can best learn to understand in 
the history of the various religions of the world — 
so many voyages of discovery, each full of sufferings 
and heroic feats, all looking toward the same Pole, 
each to be judged by itself, none, I believe, to be 
condemned altogether. MS. 



To assume that every word, every letter, every 
parable, every figure was whispered to the authors 
of the Gospels, is certainly an absurdity, and 
rests only on human . . . authority. But 
the true revelation, the real truth, as it was already 
anticipated by the Greek philosophers, slowly 
accepted by Jews, like Philo and the contempo- 



LIFE AND RELIGION 191 

raries of Jesus, taught by men like Clement and 
Origen in the ancient Greek Church, and, in 
fine, realised in the life of Jesus, and sealed by 
His death, is no absurdity: it is for every thinking 
Christian the eternal life, or the Kingdom of God 
on earth, which Jesus wished to establish, and in 
part did establish. To become a citizen of this 
Kingdom is the highest that man can attain, but 
it is not attained merely through baptism and 
confirmation; it must be gained in earnest spiritual 
conflict. Silesian Horseherd. 



THE RIG-VEDA 

The Veda alone of all works I know treats of a 
genesis of God-consciousness, compared to which 
the Theogony of Hesiod is like a wornout creature. 
We see it grow slowly and gradually with all its 
contradictions, its sudden terrors, its amazements, 
and its triumphs. As God reveals His Being in 
Nature in her order, her indestructibility, in the 
eternal victory of light over darkness, of spring 
over winter, in the eternally returning course of 
the sun and the stars, so man has gradually spelt 
out of nature the Being of God, and after trying 
a thousand names for God in vain we find Him 
in the Veda already saying: "They call him 
Indra, Mitra, Varuna; then they call him the 
Heavenly, the bird with beautiful wings; that 
which is One they call in various ways." . . . 
The belief in immortality is only the other side, as it 
were, of the God-consciousness, and both are 
originally natural to the Aryan race. Life. 



192 



SCIENCE 

Every true Science is like a hardy Alpine guide 
that leads us on from the narrow, through it may 
be the more peaceful and charming valleys of our 
preconceived opinions, to higher points, apparently 
less attractive, nay, often disappointing for a 
time, till, after hours of patient and silent 
climbing, we look round, and see a new world 
around us. Chips from a German Workshop. 



A new horizon has opened, our eyes see 
far and wide, and as the world beneath us 
grows wider and larger, our own hearts 
seem to grow wider and larger, and we 
learn to embrace the far and distant, and all 
that before seemed strange and indifferent, 
with a warmer recognition and a deeper human 
sympathy; we form wider concepts, we perceive 
higher truths. Ibid. 



What is natural is divine, what is supernatural 
is human. Gifford Lectures, I. 

i93 



i 9 4 LIFE AND RELIGION 

Man is the measurer of all things, and what is 
Science but the reflection of the outer world on 
the mirror of the mind, growing more perfect, 
more orderly, more definite, more great, with 
every generation ? To attempt to study nature 
without studying man is as impossible as to study 
light without studying the eye. I have no mis- 
givings, therefore, that the lines on which this 
College [Mason Science College] is founded will 
ever become so narrow as to exclude the science 
of man, and the science of that which makes man, 
the science of language, and, what is really the 
same, the science of thought. And where can we 
study the science of thought, that most wonderful 
instance of development, except in the languages 
and literatures of the past ? How are we to do 
justice to our ancestors except by letting them 
plead their own case in their own language ? 
Literary culture can far better dispense with 
physical science than physical science with literary 
culture, though nothing is more satisfactory than 
a perfect combination of the two. Life. 



THE SELF 

As behind the various gods of nature, one 
supreme deity was at last discovered in India; the 
Brahmans imagined that they perceived behind 
the different manifestations of feeling, thought, 
and will also, a supreme power which they called 
Atma, or Self, and of which the intellectual powers 
or faculties were but the outward manifestations. 
This led to a philosophy which took the place 
of religion, and recognised in the Self the only 
true being, the unborn and therefore immortal 
element in man. A step further led to the recogni- 
tion of the original identity of the subjective Self in 
man, and the objective Self in nature, and thus, from 
an Indian point of view, to a solution of all the 
riddles of the world. The first commandment of all 
philosophy, " Know thyself," became in the philos- 
ophy of the Upanishads," Know thyself as the Self," 
or, if we translate it into religious language, " Know 
that we live and move and have our being in God." 

Gifford Lectures, I. 

The death of a child is as if the flash of the 
Divine eye had turned quickly away from the 

195 



196 LIFE AND RELIGION 

mirror of this world, before the human conscious- 
ness woke up and thought it recognised itself in 
the mirror, often only to perceive for a moment, 
just as it closes its eyes for the last time, that that 
which it took for itself was the shadow or reflection 
of its eternal Self. Life. 



A man need not go into a cave because he has 
found his true Self; he may live and act like every- 
body else; he is "living but free." All remains 
just the same, except the sense of unchangeable, 
imperishable self which lifts him above the 
phenomenal self. He knows he is wearing clothes, 
that is all. If a man does not see it, if some of his 
clothes stick to him like his very skin, if he fears 
he might lose his identity by not being a male 
instead of a female, by not being English instead 
of German, by not being a child instead of a man, 
he must wait and work on. Good works lead to 
quietness of mind, and quietness of mind to true 
self knowledge. Is it so very little to be only 
Self, to be the subject that can resist, i. e., 
perceive the whole universe, and turn it into 
his object ? Can we wish for more than 
what we are, lookers on — resisting what tries to 
crush us, call it force, or evil, or anything else ? 

Ibid. 



LIFE AND RELIGION 197 

The impression made on me by the look of a 
child who is not yet conscious of himself and of the 
world round him, is that of still undisturbed 
godliness. Only when self-consciousness wakes 
little by little, through pleasure or pain, when the 
spirit accustoms itself to its bodily covering, when 
man begins to say / and the world to call things 
his, then the full separation of the human self 
from the Divine begins, and it is only after long 
struggles that the light of true self-consciousness 
sooner or later breaks through the clouds of 
earthly semblances, and makes us again like 
the little children "of whom is the Kingdom of 
Heaven." In God we live and move and have our 
being; that is the sum of all human wisdom, and he 
who does not find it here will find it in another life. 
All else that we learn on earth, be it the history of 
nature or of mankind, is for this end alone, to 
show us everywhere the presence of a Divine pro- 
vidence, and to lead us through the knowledge of 
the history of the human spirit to the knowledge 
of ourselves, and through the knowledge of the 
laws of nature to the understanding of that human 
nature to which we are subjected in life. 

Ibid. 

To my mind the birth of a child is not a breach 
of the law of continuity, but on that very ground 



198 LIFE AND RELIGION 

I must admit the previous existence of the Self 
that is here born as a child, and which brings 
with it into this new order of things simply its 
self-consciousness, and even that not developed 
but undeveloped potentia, in a sleep. When 
afterward a child awakes to self-consciousness, 
that is really its remembrance of its former exist- 
ence. The Self which it becomes conscious of, 
remember, is in its essence not of this world only, 
but of a former as well as of a future world. This 
constitutes in fact the only distinct remembrance 
in every human being of a former life. There are 
besides indistinct remembrances of his former 
existence, viz., the many dispositions which every 
thinking man finds in himself, and which are not 
simply the result of the impressions of this world 
on a so-called tabula rasa. Unless we begin life 
as tabula rasa we begin it as tabula preparata, as 
leukomata, and whatever colour or disposition, or 
talent, or temperament, whatever there is inex- 
plicable in each individual, that he will 
perceive, or possibly remember, as the result 
of the continuity between his present and 
former life. MS. 



What then is that which we call Death ? Sepa- 
ration of the Self from a living body. If so, does 



LIFE AND RELIGION 199 

the body die because the Self leaves it, or does the 
Self leave the body because it dies ? What has 
life to do with the Self? Has the Self which for 
a time dwells in a living body anything to do with 
what we call the life of that body ? Does the Self 
take possession of a body because it lives, or does 
the body live because the Self has taken possession 
of it ? The difficulty arises from our vague con- 
ception of life. Life is only a mode of existence. 
Existence is possible without what we call 
life, not life without existence. To live means 
to be able to absorb, but who or what is 
able ? The Self exists, it is sentient, capable 
of perception by becoming embodied. It is 
perceptive because sentient, it is conceptive 
because perceptive. The difficulty lies in the 
embodiment. It is there where all philosophy 
becomes ridiculous. MS. 



Knowledge belongs to the Self alone, call it 
what we will. The nerve fibres might vibrate as 
often as they pleased, millions and millions of 
times in a second; they could never produce the 
sensation of red if there were no Self as the receiver 
and illuminator, the translator of these vibrations 
of ether; this Self that alone receives, alone 
illumines, alone knows, and of which we can say 



200 LIFE AND RELIGION 

nothing more than that it exists, that it perceives, 
and as the Indian philosophers add, that it is 
blessed, i. e., that it is complete in itself, serene 
and eternal. Silesian Horseherd. 



SORROW AND SUFFERING 

How mysterious all this suffering is, particularly 
when it produces such prostration that it must 
lose all that elevating power which one knows 
suffering does exercise in many cases. It seems 
sometimes as if a large debt of suffering had to be 
paid off, and that some are chosen to pay a large, 
very large, sum so that others may go free. We 
have our own burden to bear, but it is a burden 
that seems to make other things easy to bear — it 
strengthens even when it seems to crush. But 
how could one bear that complete prostration of 
all powers which must make death seem so much 
preferable to life. And yet life goes on, and 
people care about a hundred little things, and 
break their hearts if they do not get them. MS, 



Such trials as you have had to pass through are 
not sent without a purpose, and if you say that 
they have changed your views of life, such a 
change in a character like yours can only be a 
change in advance, a firmer faith in those truths 
which have been revealed to the dim sight of human 

201 



202 LIFE AND RELIGION 

nature, a stronger will to resist all falsehood and 
tampering with the truth, and a deeper conviction 
that we owe our life to Him who has given it, and 
that we must fight His battle when He calls us to 
do it. MS. 



God knows that we want rain and storm as 
much as sunshine, and He sends us both as seems 
best to His love and wisdom. When all breaks 
down He lifts us up. But when we feel quite 
crushed and forsaken and alone, we then feel the 
real presence of our truest Friend, who whether 
by joys or sorrows, is always calling us to Him, and 
leading us to that true Home where we shall find 
Him, and in Him all we loved, with Him all we 
believed, and through Him all we hoped for and 
aspired to on earth. Our broken hearts are the 
truest earnest of everlasting life. Life. 



We must submit, but we must feel it a great 
blessing to be able to submit, to be able to trust 
that infinite love which embraces us on all sides, 
which speaks to us through every flower and every 
worm, which always shows us beauty and per- 
fection, which never mars, never destroys, never 
wastes, never deceives, never mocks. MS. 



LIFE AND RELIGION 203 

There is but one help and one comfort in these 
trials, that is to know by whom they are sent. If 
one knows that nothing can happen to us without 
Him, one does not feel quite helpless, even under 
the greatest terrors of this life. MS. 



How little one thinks that many trials and 
afflictions may come upon us any day. One lives 
as if life were to last forever, and as if we should 
never part with those who are most dear to us. 
Life would be intolerable were it otherwise, but 
how little one is prepared for what life really is. 

MS. 

Why is there so much suffering in this world ? 
I cannot think it improves us much, and yet it 
must have its purpose. All these are questions 
far too high for us — we are like children and more 
than children, when we come to think of them. 
All we know is that where we catch a glimpse of 
God's handiwork, either in the natural or moral 
world, it is so wonderfully perfect, so beyond all 
our measures, that we feel safe as in a good ship, 
however rough the sea may be. Whatever we 
may believe or hope, or wish for, will be far ex- 
ceeded by that Higher Will and Wisdom which 
supports all, even us little souls. MS. 



20 4 LIFE AND RELIGION 

The sorrows of life are inevitable, but they are 
hard to bear, for all that. They would be harder 
still if we did not see their purpose of reminding 
us that our true life is not here, but that we are 
here on a voyage that may be calm or stormy, and 
which is to teach us what all sailors have to learn, 
courage, perseverance, kindness, and in the end 
complete trust in a Higher Power. MS. 



Sorrow is necessary and good for men; one 
learns to understand that each joy must be in- 
demnified by suffering, that each new tie which 
knits our hearts to this life must be loosed again, 
and the tighter and the closer it was knit, the keener 
the pain of loosening it. Should we then attach 
our hearts to nothing, and pass quietly and unsym- 
pathetically through this world, as if we had nothing 
to do with it ? We neither could nor ought to act 
so. Nature itself knits the first tie between parents 
and children, and new ties through our whole life. 
We are not here for reward, for the enjoyment of 
undistuibed peace or from mere accident, but for 
trial, for improvement, perhaps for punishment; 
for the only union which can secure the happiness 
of men, the union between our Self and God's 
Self, is broken, or at least obscured, by our birth, 
and the highest object of our life is to find this 



LIFE AND RELIGION 205 

bond again, to remain ever conscious of it and hold 
fast to it in life and in death. This rediscovery of 
the eternal union between God and man constitutes 
true religion among all people. Life. 



Everyone carries a grave of lost hope in his soul, 
but he covers it over with cold marble, o r with 
green boughs. On sad days one likes to go alone 
to this God's acre of the soul, and weep there, but 
only in order to return full of comfort and hope 
to those who are left to us. Ibid. 



The sorrows of life, like all other things, pass 
away, and the larger the number who await us 
beyond, the easier the parting from those we leave 
behind. Ibid. 



Grief is a sweet remembrance of happiness 
that was. MS. 



There is the old riddle always before me, why 

was taken from me ? Human understanding 

has no answer for it, and yet I feel as certain as I 
can feel of anything that as it is, it is good, it is best, 



2o6 LIFE AND RELIGION 

better than anything I can wish for. One feels 
one's own ignorance why what seems so right and 
natural should not be, and yet one knows it could 
not be. One hides one's head in the arms of a 
Higher Power, a Friend, a Father, and more than 
a Father. Wait, and you will know. Work, and 
you will be able to bear it. MS. 



People think that grief is pain, but it is not so: 
Grief, the absorption in the quiet recollection of 
what was, but is no longer, is a pleasure, a con- 
solation, a blessing. MS. 



Those who would comfort us by bidding us for- 
get our grief, and join their happy gatherings, do 
not know what comfort is. Hearts which have 
suffered have a right to what the world may call 
grief and sorrow, but what is really a quiet com- 
munion with those whom we love, and whom we 
can find no longer among the laughter of 
the happy. MS. 



What can we pray for ? Not for special gifts, 
but only for God's mercy. We do not know what 
is good for us, and for others. What would become 



LIFE AND RELIGION 207 

of the world if all our prayers were granted ? And 
yet it is good to pray — that is, to live in all our 
joys and sorrows, with God, that unknown God 
whom we cannot reason with but whom we can 
love and trust. Human misery, outward and 
inward, is certainly a great problem, and yet one 
knows from one's own life how just the heaviest 
burdens have been blessings. The soul must be 
furrowed if it is to bear fruit. MS. 



What is the tenure of all our happiness ? Are 
we not altogether at the mercy of God ? Would it 
not be fearful to live for one day unless we knew, 
and saw, and felt His Presence and Wisdom and 
Love encompassing us on all sides ? If we once 
feel that, then even death, even the death of those 
we love best and who love us best, loses much of 
its terror: it is part and parcel of one great system 
of which we see but a small portion here, and which 
without death, without that bridge of which we see 
here but the first arch, would seem to be a mere 
mockery. That is why I said to you it is well that 
human art cannot prolong our life forever, and in 
that sentiment I should think we both agree. I 
have felt much for you, more than I cared to say. 
We are trained differently, but we are all trained 
for some good purpose, and the suffering which you 



208 LIFE AND RELIGION 

have undergone is to me like deep ploughing, the 
promise of a rich harvest. Life. 



There is a large and secret brotherhood in this 
world, the members of which easily recognise each 
other, without any visible outward sign. It is the 
band of mourners. The members of this brother- 
hood need not necessarily wear mourning; they can 
even rejoice with the joyful and they seldom sigh 
or weep when others see them. But they recognise 
and understand each other, without uttering a word, 
like tired wanderers, who, climbing a steep moun- 
tain, overtake other tired wanderers, and pause, 
and then silently go on again, knowing that they all 
hope to see the same glorious sunset high up above. 
Their countenances reflect a soft moonlight; when 
they speak, one thinks of the whispering of the leaves 
of a beech forest after a warm spring shower, and 
as the rays of the sun light up the drops of dew 
with a thousand colours, and drink them up from 
the green grass, a heavenly light seems to shine 
through the tears of the mourners, to lighten them 
and lovingly kiss them away. Almost everyone, 
sooner or later, enters this brotherhood, and those 
who enter it early may be considered fortunate, 
for they learn, before it is too late, that all which 
man calls his own is only lent him for a short time, 



LIFE AND RELIGION 209 

and the ivy of their affections does not cling so 
deeply and so strongly to the old walls of earthly 
happiness. Ibid. 



We cannot know, we cannot name the Divine, 
nor can we understand its ways as manifested in 
nature and human life. We ask why there should 
be suffering and sin, we cannot answer the question. 
All we can say is, it is willed to be so. Some help 
our human understanding may find, however, by 
simply imagining what would have been our life 
if the power of evil had not been given us. It 
seems to me that in that case we, human beings as 
we are, should never have had a conception of 
what is meant by good : we should have been like 
the birds in the air, happier, it may be, but better, 
no. Or if suffering had always been reserved for 
the bad, we should all have become the most cun- 
ning angels. Often when I am met by a difficulty 
which seems insoluble, I try that experiment, and 
say, Let us see what would happen if it were other- 
wise. Still, I confess there is some suffering on 
earth which goes beyond all understanding, which 
even the truest Christian love and charity seems 
unable to remove or mitigate. It can teach us 
one thing only, that we are blind, and that in the 
darkness of the night we lose our faith in a dawn 



2io LIFE AND RELIGION 

which will drive away darkness, fear and despair. 
Much, no doubt, could be done even by what is 
now communism, but what in earlier days was 
called Christianity. And then one wonders 
whether the world can ever again become truly 
Christian. I dare not call myself a Christian. I 
have hardly met the man in all my life who de- 
served that name. Again, I say, let us do our best, 
knowing all the time that our best is a mere nothing. 

Ibid. 



THE SOUL 

The name of the immortal element (in man) was 
not given to man as a gratuitous gift. It had to 
be gained, like the name of God, in the sweat of 
his face. Before man could say that he believed 
his soul to be immortal, he had to discover that 
there was a soul in man. It required as great an 
effort to form such a word as anima, breath, and 
to make it signify the infinite in man, as to form 
such a word as diva, bright, and to make it signify 
the infinite in nature. Gi fjord Lectures, III. 



To us the two words "body" and "soul" are so 
familiar that it seems almost childish to ask how 
man came at first to speak of body and soul. But 
what did he mean by soul ? What do we ourselves 
mean by soul ? Think of the many meanings 
contained in our word soul. Our soul may mean 
the living soul; it may mean the sentient soul; 
it may mean the seat of the passions whether good 
or bad; it may mean the organ of thought; and 
lastly, the immortal element in man. The question 
we have to ask is not, how man arrived at a name 

211 



212 LIFE AND RELIGION 

for soul, but how he came for the first time to speak 
of something different from the body. Ibid. 



The discovery of the soul, the first attempts at 
naming the soul, started everywhere from the sim- 
plest observations of material facts. The lesson can- 
not be inculcated too often that the whole wealth 
of our most abstract and spiritual words comes 
from a small number of material or concrete terms. 

Ibid. 

We see that the way which led to the discovery 
of a soul was pointed out to man as clearly as was 
the way which led him to the discovery of the gods. 
It was chiefly the breath, which almost visibly left 
the body at the time of death, that suggested the 
name of breath, and afterward the thought of 
something breathing, living, perceiving, willing, 
remembering, and thinking within us. The name 
came first, the name of the material breath. By 
dropping what seemed material even in this airy 
breath, there remained the first vague and airy 
concept of what we call soul. Ibid. 



The worship of the spirits of the departed which, 
under various forms, was so widely spread over 



LIFE AND RELIGION 213 

the ancient world, could not but accustom the 
human mind to the idea that there was something 
in man which deserved such worship. The souls 
of the departed were lifted higher and higher, till 
at last they reached the highest stage which 
existed in the human mind, namely that of divine 
beings, in the ancient sense of that word. Ibid. 



The problem of uniting the invisible and visible 
worlds presented itself under three principal 
aspects. The first was the problem of creation, 
or how the invisible Primal Cause could ever come 
in contact with visible matter and impart to it 
form and meaning. The second problem was 
the relation between God and the individual soul. 
The third problem was the return of the soul from 
the visible to the invisible world, from the prison 
of its mortal body to the freedom of a heavenly 
paradise. The individual soul as dwelling in a 
material body forms part of the created world, and 
the question of the return of the soul to God is 
therefore closely connected with that of its creation 
by, or its emanation from, God. 

Gi fjord Lectures, IV. 

When the original oneness of earth and heaven, 
of the human and the divine natures, has once been 



2i 4 LIFE AND RELIGION 

discovered, the question of the return of the soul 
to God assumes a new character. It is no longer 
a question of an ascension to heaven, an approach 
to the throne of God, an ecstatic vision of God, 
and a life in a heavenly Paradise. The vision of 
God is rather the knowledge of the divine element 
in the soul, and of the consubstantiality of the 
divine and human natures. Immortality has no 
longer to be asserted, because there can be 
no death for what is divine and therefore 
immortal in man. There is life eternal and 
peace eternal for all who feel the divine Spirit 
as dwelling within them, and have thus become 
the children of God. Ibid. 



No doubt the soul must find it difficult in child- 
hood to accustom itself to the human body, and it 
takes many years before it is quite at home. Then 
for a time all goes well, and the soul hardly knows 
it is hidden in a strange garment till the body 
begins to be weakly, and can no longer do all the 
soul wishes, and presses it everywhere, so that the 
soul appears to lose all outward freedom and move- 
ment. Then one can well understand that we 
long to be gone, and death is a true deliverance. 
God always knows best when the right time comes. 

Life. 



LIFE AND RELIGION 215 

Let us remember that we do not know what the 
soul was before this life — nay, even what it was 
during the first years of our childhood. Yet we 
believe on very fair evidence that what we call our 
soul existed from the moment of our birth. What 
ground have we, then, to doubt that it was even 
before that moment ? To ascribe to the soul a 
beginning on our birthday would be the same as 
to claim for it an end on the day of our death, for 
whatever has a beginning has an end. If then in 
the absence of any other means of knowledge, we 
may take refuge in analogy, might we not say that 
it will be with the soul hereafter as it has been here, 
and that the soul after its earthly setting will rise 
again, much as it rose here ? This is not a syllogism; 
it is analogy, and in a cosmos like ours analogy has 
a right to claim some weight, in the absence of any 
proof to the contrary. Last Essays. 



There is a question which has probably been 
asked by every human heart: "Granting that 
the soul cannot, without self-contradiction, be 
mortal, will that soul be itself, know itself, and 
will it know others whom it has known before?" 
For the next life, it is said, would not be worth 
living if the soul did not recollect itself, recognise 
not only itself, but those whom it has known and 



216 LIFE AND RELIGION 

loved on earth. Here analogy alone can supply 
some kind of answer: "It will be hereafter as it 
has been" is not, in the absence of any evidence 
to the contrary, an argument that can be treated 
with contempt. Our soul here may be said to 
have risen without any recollection of itself and 
of the circumstances of its former existence. But 
it has within it the consciousness of its eternity, 
and the conception of a beginning is as impossible 
for it as that of an end, and if souls were to meet 
again hereafter as they met in this life, as they 
loved in this life, without knowing that they had 
met and loved before, would the next life be so 
very different from what this life has been here on 
earth — would it be so utterly intolerable and 
really not worth living ? Ibid. 



When the soul has once reached that union 
with God, nay, when it lives in the constant pres- 
ence of God, evil becomes almost impossible. 
We know that most of the evil deeds to which 
human nature is prone are possible in the dark 
only. Before the eyes of another human being, 
more particularly of a beloved being, they become 
at once impossible. How much more in the real 
presence of a real and really beloved God, as felt 
by the true mystic, not merely as a phrase, but as 



LIFE AND RELIGION 217 

a fact ? As long as there is no veil between him 
and God, evil thoughts, evil words, and evil deeds 
are simply impossible to one who feels the actual 
presence of God. Nor is he troubled any longer 
by questions, such as how the world was created, 
how evil came into the world. He is satisfied 
with the Divine Love that embraces his soul; 
he has all that he can desire, his whole life is hid 
through Christ in God, death is swallowed up in 
victory, the mortal has become immortal, neither 
death nor life, nor things present, nor things to 
come, is able to separate his soul from the love of 
God. Gi fjord Lectures, IV* 



THEOSOPHY 

This venerable name (Theosophy) so well 
known among early Christian thinkers, as ex- 
pressing the highest conception of God within 
the reach of the human mind, has of late been so 
greatly misappropriated that it is high time to 
restore it to its proper function. It should be 
known once for all that one may call oneself a 
theosophist without . . . believing in any 
occult sciences and black art. 

Gi fjord Lectures, IF. 

There is nothing esoteric in Buddhism. Bud- 
dhism is the very opposite of esoteric — it is a religion 
for the people at large, for the poor, the suffering, 
the ill-treated. Buddha protests against the very 
idea of keeping anything secret. There was much 
more of that esoteric teaching in Brahmanism. 
There was the system of caste, which deprived the 
Sudras, at least, of many religious privileges. 
But I do say that even in Brahmanism there is 
no such thing as an esoteric interpretation of the 
Sastras. The Sastras have but one meaning, and 
all who had been properly prepared by education 

2l8 



LIFE AND RELIGION 219 

had access to them. There are some artificial 
poems, which are so written as to admit of two 
interpretations. They are very wonderful, but 
they have nothing to do with philosophical doc- 
trines. Again there are erotic poems in Sanscrit 
which are explained as celebrating the love and 
union between the soul and God. But all this is 
perfectly well known, there is no mystery in it. 

Life. 



TRUTH 

What is wanted is the power of sifting evidence, 
and a simple love of truth. Whatever value we 
may attach to our own most cherished convic- 
tions there is something more cherished than all 
of them, and that is a perfect trust in truth, if 
once we have seen it. Last Essays. 



True reverence does not consist in declaring a 
subject, because it is dear to us, to be unfit for 
free and honest inquiry; far from it! True rev- 
erence is shown in treating every subject, how- 
ever sacred, however dear to us, with perfect 
confidence, without fear and without favour; with 
tenderness and love, by all means, but, before all, 
with unflinching and uncompromising loyalty to 
truth. Science of Religion. 



Do we lose anything if we find that what we 
hold to be the most valuable truth is shared in 
and supported by millions of human beings ? 
Ancien philosophers were most anxious to sup- 

%2Q 



LIFE AND RELIGION 221 

port their own belief in God by the unanimous 
testimony of mankind. They made the greatest 
efforts to prove that there was no race so degraded 
and barbarous as to be without a belief in some- 
thing divine. Some modern theologians seem to 
grudge to all religions but their own the credit of 
having a pure and true, nay, any concept of God 
at all, quite forgetful of the fact that a truth does 
not cease to be a truth because it is accepted 
universally. I know no heresy more dangerous 
to true religion than this denial that a true concept 
of God is within the reach of every human being, 
is, in fact, the common inheritance of mankind, 
however fearfully it may have been misused and 
profaned by Christian and un-Christian nations. 

Gifford Lectures, II. 

If Comparative Theology has taught us any- 
thing, it has taught us that there is a common 
fund of truth in all religions, derived from a rev- 
elation that was neither confined to one nation, 
nor miraculous in the usual sense of that word, 
and that even minute coincidences between the 
doctrines, nay, between the external accessories 
of various religions, need not be accounted 
for at once by disguised borrowings, but can be 
explained by other and more natural causes. 

Ibid. 



222 LIFE AND RELIGION 

Can there be anything higher and better than 
truth ? Is any kind of religion possible without 
an unquestioning trust in truth ? No one knows 
what it is to believe who has not learnt to believe 
in truth, for the sake of truth, and for the sake of 
truth only. Gijford Lectures, III. 



It may be quite right to guard against dangers, 
whether real or imaginary, so long as it is possible. 
But when it is no longer possible, the right thing 
is to face an enemy bravely. Very often the 
enemy will turn out a friend in disguise. We 
cannot be far wrong, if we are only quite honest, 
but if we are once not quite honest over a few 
things, we shall soon become dishonest over many 
things. In teaching on religion, even on Natural 
Religion, we must look neither right nor left, but 
look all facts straight in the face to see whether 
they are facts or not, and, if they are facts, to 
find out what they mean. Ibid. 



Some people say that they can derive no help, 
no comfort, from what they call spiritual only. 
Spiritual only — think what that only would mean, 
if it could have any meaning at all. We might 
as well say of light that it is light only, and that 



LIFE AND RELIGION 223 

what we want is the shadow which we can grasp. 
So long as we know the shadow only, and not the 
light that throws it, the shadow only is real, and 
not the light. But when we have once turned our 
head and seen the light, the light only is real and 
substantial, and not the shadow. Ibid. 



We find in the Upanishads what has occupied 
the thoughts of man at all times, what occupies 
them now and will occupy them forever — a search 
after truth, a desire to discover the Eternal that 
underlies the Ephemeral, a longing to find in the 
human heart the assurance of a future life, and 
an attempt to reunite the bond which once held 
the human and the divine together, the true atone- 
ment between God and man. Ibid. 



We have toiled for many years and been troubled 
with many questionings, but what is the end of 
it all ? We must learn to become simple again 
like little children. That is all we have a right 
to be: for this life was meant to be the childhood 
of our souls, and the more we try to be what we 
were meant to be, the better for us. Let us use 
the powers of our minds with the greatest freedom 
and love of truth, but let us never forget that we 



224 LIFE AND RELIGION 

are, as Newton said, like children playing on the 
seashore, while the great ocean of truth lies undis- 
covered before us. Life. 



Nothing I like better than when I meet a man 
who differs from me; he always gives me some- 
thing, and for that I am grateful. Nor am I at 
all so hopeless as many people, who imagine that 
two people who differ can never arrive at a mutual 
understanding. . . . Why do people differ, 
considering that they all begin with the same love 
of truth and are all influenced by the same envi- 
ronment ? Well, they often differ because one is 
ignorant of facts which the other knows and has 
specially studied. . . . But in most cases 
people differ because they use their words loosely, 
and because they mix up different subjects instead 
of treating them one by one. Ibid. 



THE WILL OF GOD 

Through my whole life I have learned this one 
lesson — that nothing can happen to us, unless it 
be the will of God. There can be no disappoint- 
ment in life if we but learn to submit our will to 
the will of God. Let us wait for a little Jwhile, 
and to those whose eyes are turned to God 
and eternity the longest life is but a little 
while — let us wait, then, in faith, hope, and 
charity; these three abide, but the greatest of 
these is charity. Life. 



Whatever happens to us is always the best for 
us, even if we do not at once understand and 
perceive it. MS. 



Surely everything is ordered, and ordered for 
our true interests. It would be fearful to think 
that anything, however small in appearance, 
could happen to us without the will of God. If 
you admit the idea of chance or unmeaning events 
anywhere, the whole organisation of our life in 

225 



226 LIFE AND RELIGION 

God is broken to pieces. We are, we don't know 
where, unless we rest in God and give Him praise 
for all things. We must trust in Him whether 
He sends us joy or sorrow. If He sends us joy, 
let us be careful. Happiness is often sent to try 
us, and is by no means a proof of our having 
deserved it. Nor is sorrow always a sign of God's 
displeasure, but frequently, nay, always, of His 
love and compassion. We must each interpret 
our life as best we can, but we must be sure that 
its deepest purpose is to bring us back to God 
through Christ. Death is a condition of our life 
on earth; it brings the creature back to its Creator. 
The creature groans at the sight of death, but 
God will not forsake us at the last, He who has 
never forsaken us from the first breath of our life 
on earth. If it is His will we may live to serve 
Him here on earth for many happy years 
to come. If He takes either of us away, His 
name be praised. We live in the shadow of 
death, but that shadow should not darken the 
brightness of our life. It is the shadow of 
the hand of our God and Father and the 
earnest of a higher, brighter life hereafter. 
Our Father in Heaven loves us more than any 
husband can love his wife, or any mother her 
child. His hand can never hurt us, so let us hope 
and trust always. Life, 



LIFE AND RELIGION 227 

Our lives are in the hands of a Father who 
knows what is best for all of us. Death is painful 
to the creature, but in God there is no death, no 
dying; dying belongs to life, and is only a passage 
to a more perfect world into which we all go when 
God calls us. When one's happiness is perfect, 
then the thought of death often frightens one, 
but even that is conquered by the feeling and the 
faith that all is best as it is, and that God loves 
us more than even a father and mother can love 
us. It is a beautiful world in which we live, but 
it is only beautiful and only really our home 
when we feel the nearness of God at each moment 
and lean on Him and trust in His love. . . . 
When the hour of parting comes, we know that 
love never dies and that God who bound us closely 
together in this life will bring us together where 
there is no more parting. MS. 



WONDER 

There are few sensations more pleasant than 
that of wondering. We have all experienced it 
in childhood, in youth, in manhood, and we may 
hope that even in our old age this affection of 
the mind will not entirely pass away. If we 
analyse this feeling of wonder carefully, we shall 
find that it consists of two elements. What we 
mean by wondering is not only that we are startled 
or stunned — that I should call the merely passive 
element of wonder. When we say "I wonder," 
we confess that we are taken aback, but there is 
a secret satisfaction mixed up with our feeling of 
surprise, a kind of hope, nay, almost of certainty, 
that sooner or later the wonder will cease, that 
our senses or our mind will recover, will grapple 
with these novel expressions or experiences, grasp 
them, it may be, know them, and finally triumph 
over them. In fact, we wonder at the riddles of 
nature, whether animate or inanimate, with a firm 
conviction that there is a solution to them all, 
even though we ourselves may not be able to find 
it. Wonder, no doubt, arises from ignorance, 
but from a peculiar kind of ignorance, from what 

228 



LIFE AND RELIGION 229 

might be called a fertile ignorance; an ignorance 
which, if we look back at the history of most of 
our sciences, will be found to have been the mother 
of all human knowledge. 

Chips from a German Workshop. 



WORDS 

What people call "mere words" are in truth 
the monuments of the fiercest intellectual battles, 
triumphant arches of the grandest victories won 
by the intellect of man. When man had formed 
names for body and soul, for father and mother, 
and not till then, did the first art of human history 
begin. Not till there were names for right and 
wrong, for God and man, could there be any- 
thing worthy of the name of human society. 
Every new word was a discovery, and these early 
discoveries, if but properly understood, are more 
important to us than the greatest conquests of the 
kings of Egypt and Babylon. Not one of our 
greatest explorers has unearthed more splendid 
palaces than the etymologist. Every word is the 
palace of a human thought, and in scientific 
etymology we possess the charm with which to 
call these ancient thoughts back to life. 

Chips from a German Workshop. 

Cannot a concept exist without a word ? Cer- 
tainly not, though in order to meet every possible 
objection we may say that no concept can exist 

230 



LIFE AND RELIGION 231 

without a sign, whether it be a word or anything 
else. And if it is asked whether the concept 
exists first and the sign comes afterward, I should 
say No: the two are simultaneous, but in strict 
logic the sign, being the condition of a concept, 
may really be said to come first. After a time, 
words may be dropped, and it is then, when we try 
to remember the old word that gave birth to our 
concept, that we are led to imagine that concepts 
came first and words afterward. I know how 
difficult it is to see this clearly. We are so accus- 
tomed to think without words that we can hardly 
realise the fact that originally no conceptual 
thought was possible without these or other signs. 

Gifford Lectures, I. 



WORK 

If you have found a work to which you are 
ready to sacrifice the whole of your life, and if you 
have faith in yourselves, others will have faith 
in you, and, sooner or later, a work that must 
be done will be done. Gifjord Lectures, II. 



What flimsy things the so-called pleasures of 
life are — how little in them that lasts. To delight 
in doing one's work is life — that is what helps us 
on, though the road is sometimes very stiff* and 
tiring — uphill rather, it would seem, than downhill, 
and yet downhill it is. MS. 



A distaste for work is only another name for a 
distaste for duty, a disregard for those command- 
ments which hold society together, a disregard of 
the commandments of God. No doubt there is 
that reward in work that after a time it ceases to 
be distasteful, and like many a bitter medicine 
becomes liked, but that reward is vouchsafed to 
honest work only. MS. 

232 



LIFE AND RELIGION 233 

Work is the best healer of sorrow. In grief or 
disappointment try hard work; it will not fail you. 

Autobiography. 

No sensible man ought to care about posthumous 
praise, or posthumous blame. Enough for the day 
is the evil thereof. Our contemporaries are our 
right judges, our peers have to give their votes in 
the great academies and learned societies, and if 
they on the whole are not dissatisfied with the 
little we have done, often under far greater diffi- 
culties than the world was aware of, why should 
we care for the distant future ? Ibid. 



Put your whole heart, or your whole love into 
your work. Half-hearted work is really worse 
than no work. Last Essays. 



Much of the best work in the world is done by 
those whose names remain unknown, who work 
because life's greatest bliss is work, and who 
require no reward beyond the consciousness that 
they have enlarged the knowledge of mankind and 
contributed their share to the final triumph of 
honesty and truth. 

Chips from a German Workshop. 



234 LIFE AND RELIGION 

True immortality (of fame) is the immortality 
of the work done by man, which nothing can make 
undone, which lives, works on, grows on forever. 
It is good to ourselves to remember and honour 
the names of our ancestors and benefactors, but 
to them, depend upon it, the highest reward was 
not the hope of fame, but their faith in themselves, 
their faith in their work, their faith that nothing 
really good can ever perish, and that Right and 
Reason must in the end prevail. Ibid. 



It is given to few scholars only to be allowed to 
devote the whole of their time and labour to the 
one subject in which they feel the deepest interest. 
We have all to fight the battle of life before we can 
hope to secure a quiet cell in which to work in the 
cause of learning and truth. Ibid. 



What author has ever said the last word he 
wanted to say, and who has not had to close his 
eyes before he could write finis to his work ? 

Autobiography. 



THE WORLD 

There is no other Christian explanation of the 
world than that God thought and uttered it, and 
that man follows in life and thought the thoughts 
of God. We must not forget that all our knowledge 
and hold of the world are again nothing but 
thoughts, which we transform under the law of 
causality into objective realities. It was this 
unswerving dependence on God in thought and 
life that made Jesus what He was, and what we 
should be if we only tried, viz. : children of God. 

Silesian Horseherd. 

I cannot help seeing order, law, reason or 
Logos in the world, and I cannot account for it by 
merely ex post events, call them what you like — sur- 
vival of the fittest, natural selection, or anything else. 

Last Essays. 

Think only what it was to believe in an order of 
the world, though it be no more at first than a 
belief that the sun will never overstep his bounds. 
It was all the difference between a chaos and a 
cosmos, between the blind play of chance and an 

235 



236 LIFE AND RELIGION 

intelligible and therefore an intelligent providence. 
How many souls, even now when everything else 
has failed them, when they have parted with the 
most cherished convictions of their childhood, 
when their faith in man has been poisoned, and 
when the apparent triumph of all that is selfish, 
ignoble, and hideous has made them throw up 
the cause of truth, of righteousness and innocence 
as no longer worth fighting for, at least in this 
world; how many, I say, have found their last 
peace and comfort in the contemplation of the 
order of the world, whether manifested in the 
unvarying movement of the stars, or revealed in 
the unvarying number of the petals and stamens 
and pistils of the smallest forget-me-not. How 
many have felt that to belong to this cosmos, to 
this beautiful order of nature, is something at 
least to rest on, something to trust, something to 
believe, when everything else has failed. To us, 
this perception of law and order in the world may 
seem very little, but to the ancient dwellers on 
earth, who had little else to support them, it was 
everything — because, if once perceived, if once 
understood, it could never be taken from them. 

Hibbert Lectures. 

We must learn to see a meaning in everything. 
No doubt we cannot always see cause and effect, 



LIFE AND RELIGION 237 

and it is well we cannot. It is quite true that we 
do not always get our deserts. And yet we must 
believe that we do — only if we knew it, the whole 
fabric of the world would be destroyed, there would 
be neither virtue nor vice in the whole world, noth- 
ing but calculation. We should avoid the rails 
laid down by the world because we should know 
that the engine would be sure to come and mangle 
us. In this way the world holds together, and it 
could not in any other way. Life. 



There is to me a beauty and mystery and 
sanctity about flowers, and when I see them come 
and go, no one knows whence and whither, I ask 
what more miracles do we want — what better, more 
beautiful, more orderly world could we wish to 
belong to than that by which we are surrounded 
and supported on all sides ? Where is there a 
flaw or a fault ? Then why should we fear unless 
the flaws are within us, and we will not see the 
blessing and the rest which we might enjoy if we 
only trusted to the Author of all that beauty, order 
and wisdom about us. It is a perfect sin not to be 
happy in this world, and how much of the misery 
which there is, is the work of men, or could be 
removed by men, if they would but work together 
for each other's good. Ibid. 



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